If we mention that something is made with titanium, most people will say, “Wow.” Something about titanium symbolises high quality, and everyone knows it. Yet the weird thing is that few people have a passing knowledge of chemistry or metallurgy, and even fewer could tell the difference between a piece of titanium and a piece…

It’s nice to get the right advice. But it’s even better to get the right advice before you know you need it. When Infomo chief executive Dr. Ananda Rao asked EverEdge for an intangible asset audit, he was hoping for a 30,000-foot view of all the things that made his company valuable. He didn’t expect…

Overvalued? Undervalued? Trading sideways? Bull? Bear? No one really knows what’s happening in the equities market. We need a better way. The numbers can get overwhelming if you look only at the trend lines and the equities values. For example, the total value of the US stock market has grown by 6.8% per year since the peak…

Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) are a funny way to protect intangible assets. They are meant to stop signees from speaking about what they see, hear or read at a company. But they don’t stop information from getting out eventually because no form of censorship (and NDAs are a type of censorship) will ever stop a good…

Not too long ago, we hypothesised that copyright law might be the best way to short-circuit the looming artificial intelligence (AI) apocalypse. Our reasoning was simple: If the courts forced AI companies to pay the full market price for each article, video, or audio they needed to train their machines, it would quickly become prohibitively…

Every time McDonald’s comes up in conversation, we find a new addition to the list of why it remains one of the most successful business models in history. Ruthless consistency — that’s what makes McDonald’s so special. Consistency is effectively an intangible asset for any fast-food brand, and McDonald’s will do anything to maintain consistency…

We love to laugh at conspiracy theories. Who can possibly believe that extraterrestrials secretly rule the world or that aircraft exhaust brainwashes people? Conspiracies are silly, right? Well, not exactly. Most conspiracy theories are a category of the mind (as in, imaginary patterns). But conspiracies are real. Very real. In fact, conspiracies may just be…

To see the power of intangible assets, try reframing a problem and asking how the hidden value can be unlocked. It will be there, but it just needs to be seen – because it might just change the world. A normal valuation of a company looks at all its assets and liabilities to create a…

At the end of September, major parts of the notorious shadow library LibGen (Library Genesis) were switched off after a US court ordered it to pay $30 million to compensate rightsholders. The judgement said the digital library, which is full of works that are still under copyright, had committed “wilful infringement” and that the site…

The elevator pitch was simple: “software made by tradies, for tradies.” Now the New Zealand-based company has been sold for north of $100 million. “Tradies,” in case you don’t know, is a colloquial term for “tradesperson.” It’s an umbrella word that includes all types of professions from construction, electrical, plumbing, earthmoving, welding, mechanical, painting and…