Intangible Asset
An asset is a resource with economic value that an individual, corporation, or country owns or controls with the expectation that it will provide a future benefit to the owner. Economists and accountants identify different categories of intangible assets for different technical measurement purposes. Economists adopt for official reporting purposes an intangible asset usage “Intangible Capital Services” to be combined with “Tangible Asset Services” and “Labour Services” to calculate real Gross Value of a sector or economy for a specified period. These values also support the calculation of the trend of the ratio of economic inputs to outputs, which constitute productivity measurement. For other academic analysis much wider category sets are used. Accounting standards capitalise different categories of intangible assets on firm balance sheets, subject to strict rules to establish cost and legitimacy for establishing their potential value, e.g. in default situations, to third parties (shareholders, lenders, liquidators). This approach presents huge disparities between net worth and market value in the most dynamic and successful modern High-Tech sectors, leaving shareholders to apply guesswork for valuing such companies. Managers must formulate their own methods to recognise, manage, and value the economic contribution made to the value of their firms by such managerial realities as App or Platform development and licensing, Training enterprise-specific features of Human Capital measurably responsible for value creation, Advertising/Market Research/Brand Strengthening measurably responsible for value creation, Organisational Structure Management measurably responsible for value creation. Opagio provides systematic and auditable methods to record these values for target setting and management of intangible assets. When shared, shareholders have much firmer evidence for assessing a firm’s value.