Today, when intangible assets can make up a huge portion of a company's value, and when that value is remeasured every business day by stock market analysts and traders, our current system of financial measurement has become increasingly disconnected from what appears to be truly valuable in the new economy. In the current economic boom, driven by the high tech sectors, not only do intangible assets make up nearly all of the value of the hottest companies but they now may represent as much as half the value of the entire U.S. economy. If this trillion dollars of intellectual capital is a mirage, then we have a catastrophe on our hands. We desperately need more precise metrics. But there is a reason why, after a decade of research, intellectual capital has yet to be adequately measured.
Intangible assets live up to their name.
They are typically amorphous, subjective, and hard to pin down. We also polled you, our readers, for those nonfinancial factors you use to evaluate an investment. A year into this research project, our work has just begun. Yet our study already has begun to yield astonishing results. We asked you that very question in a Forbes Digital Tool survey last year.