Intangibility is expressed in difficulties in measuring it, because it cannot be touched, seen, manipulated, etc., but it is a matter of appreciation and nothing else. Today's market should be able to appreciate them.
As the years passed, the concept of capital evolved from the tangible to the intangible. Today it is very difficult to coincide with Marxist thought and to make the division between capitalists and proletarians because these two terms changed their concept. Today's capitalist is not the same as it was in 1910, and today's "offspring" (if it exists) are not the same as then.
The speed of the market, the mergers, the acquisitions, the fashions, the technology, made necessary the creation of a superior value and so intangible that not even Marx himself could have imagined: knowledge would be the most important capital that companies and companies possess. people are the owners. (Congratulations Marx !!!!, in the end it was as you said)
Between 1950 and 1960 many futurologists have predicted in their books, articles, etc. "The transfer of manual activities to mental activities with many intrinsic implications that will not be perceived with the naked eye." With intrinsic implications they were referring to what we now call VALUE and there is no more intangible than the value perceived by the client-market.
When you buy shares of a company, you buy based on executive direction, sales force, marketing efforts, future projects, employee training, etc. In other words, organizations are valued on the basis of knowledge, both for the buyer who must "know" everything thoroughly, and the seller who must have superior "knowledge" of how to interest the buyer.
To see it more clearly, let's look at the acquisitions of companies that occur regularly and ask ourselves… why are they paying more than what the accounting books and their assets indicate?
The relationships indicated by tangibles vs. intangibles serve to better understand the importance of abstract type possessions, the greater the difference that separates I / T, the greater the company's value in the market.
In 1991, for example, Microsoft was 8 to 1 in the market value against physical assets ratio. In 1988 Philip Morris acquired Kraft for $ 12.9 billion, and when the accountants finished making their balance sheets, it turned out that Philip Morris had purchased $ 1.3 billion in physical goods: factories, properties, product stocks, etc.. The rest, intangibles, reached US $ 11.6 billion.
Transcribing more acquisitions of companies would be perhaps a bit tedious for the reader, so the purchase of Philip Morris was not a simple example and nothing else, but rather synthesizes the concept of what assigns the value of a company in the market.
It is evident that knowledge is irrelevant from the economic point of view if it cannot be transformed into money, and from this there is a dialectical relationship between the intangible and the tangible, that is, the results of intangible activities will produce modifications in the tangible ones and vice versa.
For companies to truly optimize the fruits of knowledge, it is necessary to move from an individualistic knowledge structure to a group structure, where all the members of the organization contribute their share of knowledge. Otherwise knowledge is likely to have no transcendent value. This is the basic premise of the concept of Intellectual Capital.
If a transcendent value is not obtained from the sum of group knowledge, it is because not only is it enough to possess it, but rather, it is necessary to accumulate, manage and correctly disseminate all the intangible aspects, among which knowledge stands out. as the most precious asset and this is the basic concept of knowledge management.
© Pablo L. Belly All rights reserved. This article may be redistributed, forwarded, copied, printed, or quoted as long as it does not modify its content and does not use it for commercial purposes. You must include this note, as well as the name of the company Belly Knowledge Management International and its author: Pablo L. Belly, the email [email protected] and the address www.bellykm.com
