Harvesting Intellectual Capital.

Intellectual Capital within a business is an asset that should be enhanced whenever possible.

Frequently, when undertaking activities that lead to increased capability, improved business processes or perhaps more efficient operations and where external resources are utilised, the opportunity of harvesting new knowledge is overlooked.

Having an established knowledge repository from which internal resources can draw will provide a valuable supplement to what they already know. With a knowledge repository being fed with additional information the reliance on external resources can become less critical.

Where external resources are engaged to fill an identified knowledge and skills gap, processes should be enacted that harvest as much of the missing knowledge as is possible for future reference.

Hand in hand, with the increase in Intellectual Capital within the business, so does its maturity increase. With more knowledge ‘in-house’ and accessible, better decisions can be made and the business can become more self-reliant and less at the ‘mercy’ of external vendors.

So often it is the external resource who walks away from a business with increased knowledge of how the business operates, making them more marketable back to the business itself or to its competitors.

By harvesting Intellectual Capital and applying it where and when appropriate a business will, over time, reap significant business benefit.