Listen to his comments in Real Audio 28.8 or 14.4 file format. As vice president of people, knowledge, and strategies at Clarica insurance company, Hubert Saint-Onge is one of a new breed of chief knowledge officers charged with assessing and managing corporate knowledge capital. He spoke with Exec about the role of intellectual capital at the Waterloo, Ontario-based company, and the need for understanding and exploiting intangible assets.
Intellectual capital is about looking at the firm from a new perspective.
So we're trying to see the firm from the perspective of those intangible assets, and see how those assets contribute to value. Obviously, you still need to manage the tangible assets to stay in business and operate. But we think that they are not what's going to create competitive advantage for us. What senior executives tend to say is that somewhere around 80 percent of the worth of the firm is in their intangible assets. But we have all been managing firms as if they are driven by tangible assets.