Generally, the intellectual capital of an enterprise includes the following four categories: human assets, customer assets, intellectual property assets and infrastructure assets. The so-called human assets refer to the skills, creativity, problem-solving ability, responsible person ability, business management ability and other talents possessed by enterprise employees. Customer equity is the relationship between an enterprise and its customers, including brand loyalty, credibility, customer consumption habits, customer information, etc. Intellectual property assets include know-how, trade secrets, trademarks, copyrights, patents and various design patents. Infrastructure assets are the technologies, working methods, and processes that enable a business to run. These include corporate culture, ways of assessing risk, management methods, financial structures, markets, or customer databases. Intellectual property assets include know-how, trade secrets, copyrights, patents and various design rights and trademarks for trade services. Skills refer to all the knowledge an individual possesses in a certain field or industry. This knowledge can be very specific, such as sales skills; it can be a function that is difficult to express, such as interpersonal skills, tasting and identification skills; or it can be very complex, such as designing a space shuttle. A patent is a property title granted by the state to the inventor of the patent. This ownership is exclusive. Patent owners can have monopoly rights over the applied projects during the patent life cycle and can earn excess profits. The life span of patent rights varies from country to country. Usually 17 years-20 years.
Copyright protects the right to express a certain matter. It is generally used in literary works, photography works, paintings, pictures, sculptures and musical works, in addition to computer software and so on. Copyright protection varies from country to country, but generally begins from the date of registration by the author. It is valid during the lifetime of the author and for 50 years after his death.
A trademark is a registered mark related to a company or its products, used to distinguish other companies and products, and to protect the brand. Trademarks can become very valuable assets that last for many years and increase in value. Service marks are similar to trademarks, and their function is to distinguish the services of different companies. After registration, a trademark can enjoy exclusive rights granted by law as long as it is used continuously.
A trade secret is information that is not known to other businesses in the market. He mainly relies on confidentiality or non-disclosure agreements to maintain it. It can be an unapplied patent, a piece of news, a new development, a process, etc. The potential of intangible assets related to the market include various brands, customer trust, long-term customers, sales channels, patent grant contract agreements, etc. A company without market assets has no competitive advantage in the market. Brand is one of the most obvious market assets. Marlboro, Rolls-Royce, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Ferrari, etc. These beautiful brand images have brought huge market returns to businesses.
Customer trust is also a market asset. It can ensure product sales and appropriate inventory for various purposes, and at the same time bring you long-term customers, and even become your reserves. Customer trust is marked by long-term purchases or sales. Some industries are particularly dependent on customer trust and long-term customers. Such as airlines, insurance companies, financial services companies, etc. Perfect sales channels are huge market assets. A good sales channel can ensure that all possible customers in the entire market are served and maximize the sales of products and services. Favorable contracts refer to contracts that are beneficial to the company's development due to its special position in the market. It can reduce the costs of advertising and merchandise sales services and ensure the quality of services. When a company competes with competitors that do not have such favorable contracts, it gains an advantage and beats its rivals. Knowledge and intellectual capital are the objective basis of value formation in the knowledge economy.
In the era of knowledge economy, the value structure of enterprises is still composed of living labor and materialized labor, but knowledge has changed the form and connotation of labor, raising it to knowledge-based labor. First, knowledge directly affects labor, causing labor to develop into a form of mental labor and intellectual labor. The combination of labor and knowledge forms the intellectualization of labor. Second, knowledge is both an object of labor and a means of labor, and is an increasingly important condition for enterprise production to create value.
Third, knowledge and intellectual capital have become an important determinant of value formation and the prerequisites for production are determined by knowledge, not material form. The use value of knowledge products as the result of knowledge labor is also knowledge. In terms of the general form of value composition, the value of intellectual labor can still be expressed as "C V M", but the labor that creates value itself has undergone qualitative changes from the industrial economic era. Among them, "V M" is created by knowledge or intellectual capital, and "C" is the materialized labor value of knowledge innovation. Therefore, whether the value of labor transfer or newly created value is based on knowledge innovation labor, they are both products of intellectual capital. Knowledge and intellectual capital are the main sources of excess profits for enterprises.
Knowledge has revolutionized the overall quality of production factors. The importance of intellectual capital to value creation is that it leads to changes in production capabilities, thereby greatly improving labor productivity. Intellectualization of labor and knowledge innovation The direct result of labor is the output of knowledge products, which are embodied in new technologies, new processes and new products. New products are differentiated and advanced in terms of performance and features due to knowledge innovation, thus bringing greater use value to users. From the perspective of producers, it means that higher market value can be achieved and return on investment. Compared with industrialized production methods, intellectual capital and the knowledge innovation process it triggers have higher profitability and unique excess profits. Intellectual capital 1. Intellectual capital can create more total market value. According to innovation theory, demand innovation is triggered and created by supply innovation. Technological innovation is the basic form of supply innovation, including product innovation and process innovation. Knowledge innovation activities can continuously create and guide the innovation and expansion of market demand. The emergence of every new product and new technology creates new areas and development space for market demand, forming a new market, thereby breaking through the demand patterns and deadlocks under the original product and technology landscape. The development and expansion of demand enable enterprises to obtain new market value realization targets and carriers, thereby expanding the enterprise's supply, total production, and total market value created. In particular, the imbalance of supply and demand allows companies to gain greater room for market value growth. Specifically, knowledge innovation products have higher added value and profit margins. 2. Knowledge capital can reduce production costs and improve corporate economic benefits. The traditional industrialized production model is based on the processing and utilization of natural resources based on the limited nature of natural material resources. With the continuous expansion of production scale and the unlimited exploitation of natural resources. The resource cost of industrial production is getting higher and higher. Human knowledge and intellectual capital have unlimited growth possibilities, and the market value realization of the knowledge innovation process is also unlimited and has increasing returns. Due to the reusable nature of knowledge, knowledge innovation products can be produced and sold in batches without the need to repeatedly invest the same amount of resources. Therefore, input costs are rapidly diluted as sales volume increases, and unit costs are significantly reduced, thereby achieving a substantial increase in the company's marginal revenue, and leading companies' excess profits are generated.