Lucidea’s Lens: Knowledge Management Thought Leaders
Part 100 – Gordon Petrash

Gordon Petrash (1950–2021) was a pioneer and thought leader in the field of intellectual capital. His expertise was developing and implementing processes and cultures that enable companies to maximize the value of their intangible assets. 

Gordon’s work on Intellectual Asset Management (IAM) at Dow Chemical showed how corporations could manage their intellectual capital to improve the bottom line. Gordon’s specialties included intellectual asset management, intellectual capital value extraction, corporate and business management, patent management, business processes, and change management. 

Here are definitions for five of Gordon’s specialties: 

• Business Processes: Formal steps that coordinate the behavior of people, systems, information and things to produce business outcomes in support of a business strategy. 

• Change Management: A planned approach to change in an organization to address anticipated obstacles and to ensure successful adoption. 

• Intellectual Capital: Knowledge with potential for value – the sum of everything everybody in a company knows that gives it a competitive edge. A metric for the value of intellectual capital is the amount by which the enterprise value of a firm exceeds the value of its tangible (physical and financial) assets. It includes human, structural, and relational capital. 

• Intellectual Property: Any intellectual creation, such as literary works, artistic works, inventions, designs, symbols, names, images, computer code, and documents. 

• Knowledge Assets: An organization’s accumulated intellectual resources. Types of knowledge assets include information, learning, ideas, understanding, insights, memory, technical skills, and capabilities. Knowledge assets reside in documents, databases, software, patents, policies and procedures, and more. 

Book Chapters by Gordon Petrash

Profiting from Intellectual Capital: Extracting Value from Innovation by Patrick H. Sullivan – Chapter 15: Intellectual Asset Management at Dow Chemical 

Knowledge Management: Classic and Contemporary Works edited by Daryl Morey, Mark T. Maybury, and Bhavani Thuraisingham – Section Introduction: Strategy: Compelling Word, Complex Concept 

Intellectual Asset Management Model 

Six-step Process for Managing Intellectual Assets (as summarized by Thomas Stewart)

1. It begins with strategy: Define the role of knowledge in your business – for instance, the importance of intellectual investments to develop new products, vs. brick-and-mortar spending to achieve economies of scale.
2. Next, assess competitors’ strategies and knowledge assets.
3. Third, classify your portfolio: What do you have, what do you use, where does it belong?
4. Fourth, evaluate: What are your assets worth; what do they cost; what will it take to maximize their value; should you keep them, sell them, or abandon them?
5. Fifth, invest: Based on what you learned about your knowledge assets, identify gaps you must fill to exploit knowledge or holes you should plug to fend off rivals, and either direct R&D there or look for technology to license.
6. Sixth, assemble your new knowledge portfolio and repeat the process ad infinitum.

Intellectual Capital Growth from Knowledge Flows