Strategic Asset Management: Overview

• Strategic Asset Management involves defining and explaining strategic asset management.
• It relates intellectual property, human resources, market, and infrastructure assets to organizational advantages.
• The chapter discusses the importance of intellectual capital and different asset management strategies, assessing strategic asset ownership.
• The chapter covers innovation scenarios for organizations.

Strategies

• Strategies are actions to achieve objectives, considering vision and mission.
• Strategy formulation requires planning, selection, analysis, consistency, responsiveness, conformity, feasibility, flexibility, smartness, and competitiveness.
• Competitive assets include talents, abilities, resources, and properties.
• Competitive assets can be intellectual property, human resources, marketing, and infrastructure assets.

Intellectual Property Assets

• Intellectual property assets result from activities of the mind and may be products of research or accidental discoveries.
• They include trademarks, service marks, software, copyrights, patents, and trade secrets.
• Trademarks include service marks, trade names, designs, logos, seals, and symbols.
• Software includes operating systems, utilities, programs, applications, programmed manuals, operational instructions, methodologies, and techniques.
• Software is divided into system software and application software.
• Original literary, music, and art compositions can be unique and distinct intellectual property.
• Trade secrets include organizational philosophy, programs, strategies, processes, financial data, transaction data, and customer/supplier lists.
• Unique designs, innovative products, brilliant ideas, and new methods are examples of intellectual property outputs.
• Protected by law, intellectual property assets rightfully belong to individuals/organizations, who can apply for exclusivity rights via patents or copyrights.
• During the period of patent/copyright, the owner enjoys a monopoly of said assets.

Organizational Monopoly

• An organization possessing intellectual property assets is said to have a competitive edge, creating an "organizational monopoly".
• This monopoly allows the organization to solely use the intellectual property, optimize its worth, and enjoy the benefits.
• The organization carries the reputation of inventing/conceptualizing innovative ideas, products, services, processes, and technologies.
• It gains internal advantages in efficiency, productivity, pride, motivation, and employee involvement due to its innovations.
• Financial returns can be drawn from production, utilization, and sales of the intellectual property, with generous earnings over 15-25 years.
• It provides brand protection via legal mechanisms like non-disclosure agreements, patents, and copyrights, safeguarding corporate assets.
• Government protection from infringement is provided because the government respects intellectual properties.
• Brand protection is guaranteed, and trade secrets are safeguarded, with patents and copyrights as proof of legal ownership.
• It allows organizations to enjoy low-cost leadership and increase competitive strength.

Human Resource Assets

• Human resource assets consist of the organization's collective "expertise", competency asset skills, and human-centered assets.
• Collective "expertise" results from educational attainment, professional competence, environmental knowledge, work-related knowledge, and historical knowledge.
• Impressive educational attainment is not necessarily the highest level of formal schooling.
• Professional competence must be distinctive, inimitable, and forward-looking to create leverage.
• Work-related knowledge in various functions should be deliberately focused on differentiation and innovation.
• Human resource assets are smart, strategic, and aware of global, local, and organizational developments.
• Individuals with historical knowledge (long-term employees) are valuable assets with insight into the company's evolution.
• Personal traits considered as human resource assets include transformational leadership and ingenuity.
• First-rate problem-solving capabilities and a self-motivated, vibrant personality are also important.
• Other assets include adaptability, proactivity, initiative, industry, and integrity.
• Managerial, entrepreneurial, and competency asset skills involve planning, organizing, and monitoring.
• They also include business expertise, business intelligence, and a "futuring" business outlook.
• Competency assets include communication skills, IT expertise, and practical/vocational qualifications.
• These skills enhance the intellectual capital of individuals and organizations, making them invaluable assets.

Human Resource Leverage

• Human-centered assets should have employee involvement and collaborative teamwork.
• Employees should have "high" emotional quotients (EQ), self-awareness, and skills in decision-making, managing feelings, conflict resolution, and communication.
• Synergistic interrelationships should exist between management and employees, and between organization and its stakeholders.
• Commitment or a "sense of owning" should be instilled in employees, resulting in social enrichment and competitive advantage.
• Possession of human resource assets creates both advantage and leverage.
• Organizations with employees owning remarkable "expertise" assets stand out.
• They demonstrate a fusion of educational attainment, competence, environmental knowledge, and historical knowledge.
• Good personal qualities, like transformational leadership, ingenuity, and integrity, impact organizational temperament and nurture enthusiasm.
• Managerial, entrepreneurial, and competency asset skills improve effectiveness and success, creating a comparative advantage.
• Organizational human-centered assets, like high EQ, synergy, and employee involvement, open opportunities for organizational success.
• Human resources have multi-talents that contribute to the "robustness" of the intellectual capital of the organization.
• Organizations need to give employees access to opportunities for human development, constantly nurturing them.
• There is loss for the organization when employees leave, taking their cultivated assets (knowledge, expertise, skills) with them.

Marketing Assets

• Market assets include brands, company names, customer loyalty, repeat business, distribution channels, contracts, and agreements.
• Brands help attain market supremacy if they are recognized and promote substantial sales.
• Company names can become market assets if they create a gainful impression and "sell" without advertising.
• Customer loyalty, more than satisfaction, helps organizations attain bigger market share due to the customer-supplier relationship.
• Having efficient, structured distribution channels assures market control and enables organizations to extend beyond their existing reach.
• Strategic organizational alliances and linkages are needed to create market ascendancy.

Market Dominance

• Market dominance from market assets provides an effective medium for product identification that creates popularity.
• A well-known company name increases financial worth more than its physical assets, seen as "goodwill".
• Repeat business, a product of customer loyalty, demonstrates a unique form of market intimacy.
• increased product and service sales result from efficient modes of bringing goods and services to the public.

Infrastructure Assets

• Infrastructure assets include positive organizational features like structure, management philosophy, organizational culture, high involvement practices, quality standards, and technology
• These enable an organization to establish its competitive advantage.
• A lean organizational structure helps when it reduces bureaucracy, streamlines tasks, and simplifies administration.
• Organizational culture blends organizational beliefs, attitudes, values, interests, expectations, intra- and interrelationships, philosophies, and ethical practices.
• Dynamic organizational cultures are characterized by personal and organizational values aligned with beliefs and positive attitudes.
• Managerial and functional work practices, high involvement and demonstratable quality standards also make good infrastructure assets.
• For managerial processes to be infrastructure assets, errors/waste must be minimized and results quantitatively sound.
• Quality standards adopted offer competitiveness and financial returns.
• Technology, applying knowledge across fields, is an infrastructure asset when its impact is phenomenal.

Competitive Advantage

• Possession of infrastructure assets creates comparative advantage for organizations.
• A streamlined structure makes communication easier, speeding up task completion and reducing miscommunication.
• Organizational cultures create infrastructure advantage through shared beliefs, attitudes, and values and shared vision.
• Management philosophies contextualize organizational thrust, infusing substance by bringing about a synergistic paradigm.
• Ethical practices as infrastructure assets validate that ethical trade yields good business results.
• With high involvement work practices aligned with quality management, the organization possesses intellectual capital that has a good effect on results.

More on Processes

• Managerial and functional processes are both administrative and operational.
• Effective paperwork, competence, cooperative effort, and standardised processes create precision.
• Trouble-free and cost-effective functional processes minimize expenses and improve profitability.
• Quality standards include an agreed philosophy, a quality policy, a management system, continuous assurance, and periodic control.
• Information technology transforms the global skyline and acts as infrastructure; database facilitates matching employee abilities and identifying training; a database of information allows anticipating the consumer needs; a database of suppliers helps monitor inventory; a database of buyers helps create "switching costs".

Asset Management Strategies

• Possession and management of competitive strategic assets creates a viable and valuable edge in organizations.
• Intellectual property ownership assets are monopolistic assets.
• Human assets bring about leverage, influence, and power.
• Market assets result in market dominance and ascendancy.
• Comparative advantage is a natural derivative of infrastructure assets.
• Managing strategic assets means optimizing valued resources: intellectual property, human resources, market assets, and infrastructure assets.
• Pillars of competitive asset management include competency learning, strategic enhancement, and competitive innovation.

Competency Learning

• Competency Learning refers to the knowledge, attitudes, and skills expected of an individual, aligned to the organization's vision.
• It is a tool for actualization and implementation. It emphasizes performance evaluation and accountability.

Descriptions

• Clearly define tasks, functions, and responsibilities expected of an individual.
• This provides a performance framework, assures management of necessary skills, streamlines management, serves as bases for evaluating work, provides recruitment blueprint, encourages productivity, allows experts to move up.

Classifying

• Includes how core competencies are basic and include all fundamental competencies expected of every employee.
• Functional competencies are expected of employees performing job functions in marketing, production, human resource, technology, and finance.
• Managerial competencies are administrative and attitudinal in nature.

Strategic Enhancement: “Widening the Horizon"

• Strategic enhancement ensures organizations are uniquely knowledgeable to survive and compete.
• There are number of ways in strategically enhancing an organizational memory-based system.
• Maximize the reach of the organization's infrastructure technology because they approximate human intelligence.
• Corporate entities need to appreciate the business value of knowledge, information, and communication by managing infrastructure, systems and processes.

Types of Training

• Formal and informal training is a good source of knowledge.
• It realigns employees mindset to a global paradigm.
• The enrichment of job pathing should be systematized to develop multi-skilled employees.
• You must empower employees to reach sustainable self-development by promoting and rewarding valuable knowledge.
• You must optimize interactions with experts, they are assets to the organization.

Plan

• You must prepare programs leading to attitudinal change by directing the changes mainly toward intangible assets.
• Provide access to needed resources like market data and infrastructure.
• Human resource expertise must be sharpened and intellectual property rights guarded.
• Financial and management resources must be developed, enriched and supported.

Culture

• Broaden networking through strategic alliances, strategic enhancement of organizational memory, and cultural awareness.
• There are varied types of cultures that are interchangeable with nation, corporate, and intra-cultures.

Competitive Innovation

• Innovation promotes sustainability, competition, creating bargaining power through new ideas, paradigm shifts, and "revolutionizing".
• Differentiating existing products/services improves existing ones.
• Reinventing products/services is aggressive, with new features, slogans, and strategies for a higher impact.
• You must continuously experiment, design, streamline and apply recent technology.
• Changing business models will involve new plans in pursuing and conducting business.
• There needs to be a widening of breadth and depth of intellectual capita mostly on intellectual property assets.
• The best proof of competitive innovation is in intellectual capital management.