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The CICM model-not another set of circles

The projects focused on various goals and approaches: team management, destaffing, organi­zational learning, empowerment, delayering,. . . The problem? Managers attacked the issues piecemeal. Investing incrementally in new models of management, they tried to bolt them onto their old structures and integrate them into their old management doctrines.

—Christopher Bartlett5

The aim of the CICM model is far from being a melting pot in which the various programs and initiatives are simply brought together. It is designed to assist management in strategic planning related to the development of their IC for achieving and sustaining a competitive advantage and generating revenue from their largest asset base. In particular, it enables man­agement to:

•   Develop a new management approach that is better accustomed to business management at a time when IC represents critical business resources, processes, and assets.

•   Make sense of the different approaches offered to discern how and when any of these approaches fits in the CICM model.

•   Synchronize the various programs implemented to manage a group or more of IC to pre­vent waste of resources and achieve better results.

•   Generate the maximum value from an ICM program by addressing the three functions that IC plays in the business cycle of an organization, namely, creation, extraction, and maximization of value.

•   Set clear objectives for their ICM activities and thus provide a platform for a suitable measurement system.

•   Set priorities to enable effective resource allocation decisions.

•   Customize the generic CICM model to the strategic goals and the industry/business of the organization.

The last two points will be discussed in Chapter 14, but for now let's have a closer look at how the CICM model purports to do that.

New Management Approach

The CICM model does not construct a model from scratch. Instead, it builds on the rich body of knowledge that developed in the subdisciplines of knowledge management, innovation manage­ment, and IP management. It builds on the experience of companies in the United States and else­where that, for around a decade—some even longer—have been experimenting—some with great success—with new business models for managing their IC. The novelty of the CICM model lies first in the classification of IC according to its function in the business cycle, and in stream­lining the so-called subdisciplines into a synchronized model for the management of IC through­out the whole organization, at every stage of its development. The CICM approach brings all this into a comprehensive model that advances a new approach to business management.

Though new in its framework and pragmatic application, the CICM approach builds on the disciplines of knowledge, innovation, and IP management. The concepts, methods, practices, and tools that have been developed under these disciplines are presented through the lens of the CICM approach, where they are presented as stages in a comprehensive approach. The CICM model starts with the knowledge management stage in which an organization lays the foundation for ICM, without which any ICM program will suffer from a serious dysfunction as a result of undermanagement of resources. A business that has deficient resources suffers serious impedi­ments to all its operations, threatening its very existence. With increased reliance on learning, and hence the generation of knowledge resources, organizations lacking a program that identifies, develops, and sustains their knowledge base will lag behind, if they manage to survive (see also about capital management).

The knowledge management stage is one in which most attention is paid to developing the human capital and that part of the structural capital that enables knowledge and information shar­ing for two main purposes. The first is creating value through invigorating the natural function of the human brain and heart, which is to divulge knowledge, create, and communicate ideas. The second is to create a learning organization. To become a learning organization represents the optimal stage of organizational evolution in the knowledge economy, wherein the organization knows what it knows, knows how to find who knows internally, can apply and reuse its knowl­edge, and can advance on its evolutionary journey of acquiring higher intelligence (discussed in Chapter 5).

But business management is more than cultivating resources—in this case, intelligence. It is mainly about production, development, and growth—hence processes. Business processes and methods are what enable people to apply knowledge to new products and to package knowledge into new services. This is where innovation management, the second stage, kicks in. New ideas have to be collected and new product concepts generated. Then these concepts have to be assessed and filtered down to a number of new product development projects, which may even­tually develop into separate businesses. The various business processes and systems used to gen­erate ideas and turn them into marketable products, services, and new businesses form the crux of the business production process. But what does this have to do with ICM? As far as business management is concerned, innovation management as a discipline emerged as early as the 1890s with Edison's practice of innovation and was perfected as a process around the 1970s (discussed further in Chapter 7).

Despite this, a closer look reveals that business innovation has been transformed in the knowl­edge economy by the appreciation of the value of IC to business—what I will refer to hereinafter as the IC concept. This happened in two ways. First, the IC concept liberated the innovative power of the organization out of the confines of one department, namely, research and develop­ment (R&D) or new product development, into the fabric of the whole organization. Second, the IC concept (particularly appreciation of customer capital) expanded the innovation process to include networks and alliances with customers and sometimes even competitors so that they can combine mutual strengths to get to the market faster. Overall, innovation management became closely linked to the management of relationships and networks.

The CICM model recognizes and highlights the move of the innovation process to becoming network based. To that effect, it addresses how business management should be transformed to enable the management of the organization's innovation portfolio across the dispersed internal and external networks. To do this, business managers need to know the competencies and skills of their people (human capital), as well as those of their existing or potential partners (customer capital), and bring the right team together to develop new products and to grow the business.

Once a new product or service is successfully introduced in the market, the options available for expansion are numerous. Being mainly made and composed of IC, marketing of new products assumes a new dimension. That dimension relates to the potential of marketing the IP (whether a patent, a trademark, or a copyright) independent of the original product (or process) with which it was associated. This is managed under the IP management stage of the CICM model.

Though IP management as a discipline was developed well before the 1970s with very suc­cessful franchises and technological licenses, the changes introduced by the IC concept go beyond an increase in the volume of IP transactions or the appreciation of its commercial value. The IC concept, like what it did to innovation management, made IP management the job of everyone. Only when IP management infiltrates business management is a business enabled to effectively use IP as both a competitive weapon and a business asset. That is what the CICM incorporates in the IP management stage by liberating IP from the confines of the legal depart­ment to the function of business management (discussed in Chapter 8).

As a result, the CICM model brings the three disciplines (or subdisciplines) of knowledge, innovation, and IP management together to form a synchronized approach of business manage­ment based on the IC concept. The model's main proposition that it is effective strategic management of IC that enables an organization to sustain a competitive advantage. Under CICM, managing knowledge or innovation or any form of IC is not merely about implementing a pro­gram or creating a licensing unit or a new information technology (IT) system. It is more of a phi­losophy that has to permeate everything that the organization does and be embedded in its culture. It has to be part of its vision and strategy (discussed further in Chapter 10).

The CICM model enables management to make sense of the myriad of solutions and approaches offered under the banner of ICM and knowledge management.

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