These clusters of comparison are scattered. There is no cohesive body that actually puts all of these aspects of knowledge and intangible assets into a perspective and into a structure on a global scale, so the intangible assets of Intel, Ford and Marriott Hotels can be compared. I feel a lot of the discussion about intellectual capital is very introverted. It is confined to the internal knowledge of a firm, intangible assets that can be controlled by managers like patents or trademarks or computer systems or people. So they often are not taking customers into consideration.
Customers are people too.
One must realize that when we produce something for and with customers we create a relationship with them. This relationship is an asset and it has to be monitored. There are two or three of these customer relationship indicators that are generic. One is the customer satisfaction index. This can actually be compared between industries.