Actcell participates in the 2010 KM International Conference on 27th August 2010 in Taiwan held by China Productivity Center(http://cpc.tw/) who are our ICPC member. Hitoshi Funahashi, CEO of Actcell and Setsuko Morishita, Director of Actcell will speak on intellectual capital management and our case studies.
For more details, please see on; http://edu.cpc.org.tw/edm/2010km.html

Many books have been written about Intellectual Capital and related topics. However, I have a feeling that most of the truly pioneering books were written in the 1990s. Until now that is. If you are interested in how to build companies in the 21st Century, I recommend you to read "Intangible Capital" by Mary Adams and Mike Oleksak.

Their book delivers many fresh insights, and in particular, practical tools and guidelines for how you can navigate your company successfully in the Knowledge Economy.

You can read more about it here: http://bit.ly/dgNiHi 

If you want to learn something new, what is your primary information source? Recently I was looking for an advice on purchasing a new HDD recorder, and found the best solution within 10 minutes. How?

From Twitter. As a relatively beginner user of Twitter, I posted a tweet (actually responded to the tweet which one of my followers posted) saying "I need to buy a new HDD recorder. Which brand should I consider?" And 10 minutes later, I was convinced with purchasing one of the brands that several people recommended me, with a good reason. 

Such new media have changed the consumers' and even business' behaviors dramatically. Person that uses a powerful SNS (the term already sounds a bit obsolete) is becoming a public entity in a sense, whereas companies and organizations that used to be more public entities than individuals seem to close doors and lock themselves in under the names of compliance and governance. Relational capital (such as customers, suppliers and business partners) of an enterprise used to be more static before Web 2.0, but now companies really need to consider the public or literally "the society" including anonymous consumers and people linked to each employee for instance, as a more important stakeholder. After all, I became a potential "customer" of that HDD recorder maker because an anonymous twitter community recommended me, without the maker's awareness.  How do you measure and manage such "stakeholder"? 

Come join us! The website, www.icrating.com, is going to grow continuously. Especially we are focusing on adding content that can help practitioners in their work on developing organizational intellectual capital. On basically any level in a firm. In any type of company or organization. Non-dependent on organizational size. In any country.

Our plan is to share many of our experiences and learnings from working with intellectual capital since the mid 90ies. If you want to help us out in our cause, feel free to give suggestions and comment on our blogs, tools and other downloads. Perhaps you even want to join us as a blogger? Or you may want to become a partner in the intellectual partner community? Let us know and we will guide you.

This week we added part 2 in the whitepaper section. Also, we added a second tool for measuring IC. Both existing tools on the site are very simple and the purpose is to start giving you a flavor of how to measure IC and get started with intellectual capital management (ICM). More is to come later on. There is also a basic IC training course that you should check out, and the story section is growing. Why don’t you share your own IC stories with us? Send them to us and we will help you publish them on the site.

Or you can sign up to our sister site www.icknowledgecenter.com and start publishing your own work without anybody chaperoning you.

If you want high level professional advice in ICM, visit our global homepage www.worldicmanagement.com.

We are looking forward to sharing and interacting!
 

For ten years Actcell Corporation (ICMG from October 2011) has been a cutting-edge consultancy, providing intellectual capital management services to major corporates in Japan. After the acqusition of Intellectual Capital Sweden AB earlier this year, the network and customer base is suddenly global.

For this purpose the new global site www.worldicmanagement.com has been created. Along with it, Actcell (ICMG from October 2011) is re-launcing www.icrating.com. Here you will find IC tools, cases, training material, an IC blog etc.

The content will be growing continuously, so don't forget to visit the site on a regular basis.
 

How far has your company really got in IC development this year?

Lately, many organizations have been forced to adapt to the changing demographics of the work force. Primarily the growing number of women in leading positions and the push for ethnic diversity have been prominent topics. Some have assumed these challenges reluctantly, while others have seen the competitive advantages and have acted more aggressively.

Now there is another change looming on the horizon: adapting to the aging work force. The amount of tacit knowledge possessed by the soon retiring baby boomers is difficult to over estimate. So, how would you ensure to capture this knowledge before it is too late?

The companies who have seen this coming develop strategies around this theme, in order to capture the knowledge in structural capital. Identifying where the knowledge resides. Doubling up on critical positions, so that the coming generation gets an opportunity to learn. Setting up knowledge management systems to systematically encode the insights and knowledge of the retiring generation. Setting up knowledge transfer sessions around specific topics. Introducing mentoring programs.

Will this become an issue for your company in the next five years? If so, do you have a strategy to address it?

Last month I was in Hong Kong, training Intellectual Capital consultants for the Hong Kong Government. They believe that the development of IC is the future for Hong Kong SME’s. Thus, the services of the IC consultants will be offered for free. The rumor about this initiative is already spreading into mainland China. Most likely it will be adopted by the Chinese government. Sooner rather than later. They believe IC development will help them grow. And they outgrow most of us already. What does your government do about IC?