Many professionals talk about their intellectual capital when they should be referring to it as intellectual property. Ideas don’t become intellectual capital unless you can monetize them. In other words to qualify as capital, an idea must help you do one or more of three things:

• Get you in front of more buyers and so get you more opportunities
• Increase your conversion rate of opportunities to paid work
• Increase the amount clients pay you by allowing you to raise your fees or broaden the scope of your work

A lot of ideas generated by professionals are orphaned by their creators, who go back to their client work after publishing and posting the results of their research. The ideas are never used in a structured business development process and so remain just property, never gaining the stature of capital.

This link will take you to an article about dealing with this problem, entitled Push-Me-Pull-You. It is written by Ford Harding of Harding & Company and Bob Buday of The Bloom Group.

http://www.bloomgroup.com/content/push-me-pull-you-how-turn-intellectual-property-intellectual-capital

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