Every business has intangible assets. Most cannot name more than two or three. And almost none have a structured way to assess whether those assets are strong, growing, at risk, or invisible to the people who need to see them — investors, acquirers, boards, and lenders.
The free Intangibles Questionnaire was built to close that gap. It asks 36 structured questions across six categories of intangible investment — technology, brand and marketing, intellectual property, design, human capital and organisational capital. It scores each category from 0 to 100 and produces a report that shows where you are strong, where you are thin, and where investment would close the gap.
This guide walks through how the questionnaire works, what the results tell you, and how to use them.
The Productivity Calculator is a quantitative tool. It takes financial inputs and produces numerical outputs — GVA, EBITDA, total factor productivity. It answers the question: how productively is this business turning inputs into output?
The Intangibles Questionnaire answers a different question: where is this business investing in intangible assets, and how mature is each area?
Before you can value an asset, you need to know where it lives. This sounds obvious, but it is where most businesses fall down. A CEO who has spent a decade building a category-defining brand may never have considered that brand as a discrete, measurable asset. A CTO sitting on proprietary data pipelines may not realise those pipelines have an economic value independent of the product they serve.
The questionnaire turns a vague sense of "we have strong people and a good brand" into a scored, comparable profile. It shows where your intangible investment is mature and where it is thin, so the next conversation, with your board, an investor or Opagio Intangibles, starts from evidence rather than instinct.
Opagio's free tools each answer a different question:
| Tool | Question It Answers | What You Get |
|---|---|---|
| Opagio 12 Quick Assessment | Where does my intangible value sit across the Opagio 12 value drivers? | A first, self-rated view across the twelve drivers |
| Intangibles Questionnaire | How mature is my investment in each category of intangible asset? | A 0-100 score per category, an overall maturity level and investment priorities |
| Productivity Calculator | How productively am I converting inputs into output? | GVA, EBITDA and total factor productivity |
The questionnaire covers six categories of intangible investment. Each category has between five and seven questions.
| Category | What It Covers | Questions |
|---|---|---|
| Technology | AI adoption, software platforms, data analytics, automation, cloud infrastructure and cybersecurity | 7 |
| Brand & Marketing | Brand recognition, marketing effectiveness, customer acquisition and content strategy | 6 |
| Intellectual Property | Patents, trademarks, proprietary processes, licensing and IP protection strategy | 5 |
| Design | Product design differentiation, UX and customer experience, design thinking and competitive positioning | 5 |
| Human Capital | Retention, training, leadership development, recruitment and knowledge management | 7 |
| Organisational Capital | Process documentation, quality management, supply chain, strategic planning and governance | 6 |
The questionnaire works in six categories of intangible investment, not the Opagio 12 framework. For a first view across the Opagio 12 value drivers, use the Quick Assessment.
Each question has five answers, and each answer describes a concrete state rather than a number on a scale. You are not asked to rate yourself from 1 to 5 in the abstract. You pick the description that matches your business today.
The first technology question asks how mature your core software platforms and AI tools are. The five answers run from "No systems in place", through "Basic off-the-shelf tools", "Configured SaaS platforms" and "Integrated platforms with AI features", to "Fully custom AI-enhanced systems". The other technology questions cover:
The human capital questions look at the practices that build and keep capability: annual retention, training investment per employee, leadership development, recruitment effectiveness, engagement measurement, knowledge management and succession planning.
A SaaS company with integrated, AI-enabled platforms and a formal technology roadmap would score highly on Technology. The same company might score poorly on Organisational Capital if its core processes are undocumented and strategic planning happens ad hoc. The questionnaire surfaces both — the strength and the gap.
No account is needed. Add your company name and, if you want suggested investment figures, your annual revenue.
One category at a time, with a progress indicator. Pick the answer that best describes your business today, not where you plan to be.
A score from 0 to 100 for each category, an overall score and maturity level, a short narrative for each category, and suggested investment allocations for the categories with the largest gaps.
Use the gaps to set priorities, or take the profile into Opagio Intangibles to identify and value the specific assets behind each category.
The report is structured to be immediately useful: not just a score, but a map for action.
Your overall score places the business at one of five maturity levels:
| Level | What It Means |
|---|---|
| Nascent | Intangible investment is minimal or unmanaged |
| Early-stage | Some investment, but informal and unmeasured |
| Developing | Investment is growing and starting to be managed |
| Well-developed | Investment is documented, managed and contributing to outcomes |
| Highly mature | Intangible assets are actively managed as strategic assets |
The most valuable output is often the gap analysis. Most businesses discover a pattern: two or three categories where they are genuinely strong, and two or three where they are weaker than they assumed. This asymmetry is common and not necessarily a problem — but it needs to be visible.
Knowing your gaps is as valuable as knowing your strengths. A PE buyer will find the gaps during due diligence regardless. The question is whether you find them first and have a plan to address them — or whether they become negotiation leverage for the other side.
For example, a technology company might score highly on Technology and Intellectual Property but low on Organisational Capital and Human Capital. The technology assets are strong. But if processes are undocumented and knowledge lives in the heads of three engineers, those technology assets carry significant key-person risk — a factor that directly affects valuation multiples in an M&A transaction.
The questionnaire is designed for four primary audiences, each of whom gets different value from the results:
CEOs and founders use it as a strategic audit. It shows where the business has invested in intangible capital — often without realising it — and where it has not. For founders preparing for a funding round or exit, the profile provides the language and structure to describe what makes the business valuable beyond revenue and EBITDA.
CFOs and finance directors use it to put intangible investment on the management agenda, even where accounting standards keep it off the balance sheet. The category scores show where value is being built and where investment is falling behind.
PE operating partners and investors use it as a portfolio screen. Because every company answers the same anchored questions, running the questionnaire across portfolio companies gives comparable profiles that highlight which businesses need intervention before exit.
M&A advisors and due diligence teams use it early, to see which categories deserve a closer look before a formal purchase price allocation is commissioned.
The Intangibles Questionnaire is an entry point to a complete intangible asset management workflow — The Opagio Method.
The five steps of The Opagio Method are:
The questionnaire works at category level: where you invest and how mature each area is. Identifying and valuing individual assets — the detail behind steps 1 and 3 — happens in Opagio Intangibles.
A logistics company completes the questionnaire and scores well on Organisational Capital, thanks to documented processes and strong governance, but poorly on Brand & Marketing, with a single acquisition channel and no tracking of acquisition costs. The board uses the gap to prioritise marketing investment for the year ahead, and takes the profile into Opagio Intangibles to value the customer contracts and operating licences behind its strongest areas.
The Intangibles Questionnaire is free and takes about ten minutes. For a first view across the Opagio 12 value drivers, start with the Quick Assessment. To see either tool against your own business with the Opagio team, book a demo.
For companies that want to go further — saving results, tracking maturity over time, running the assessment across multiple business units, or valuing the individual assets behind each category — Opagio Intangibles provides persistent storage, the Value Drivers Register, portfolio views and asset-level valuation.
Assess your 12 value drivers to understand your intangible asset strengths, gaps, and growth opportunities.
A complete guide to portfolio valuation with the Opagio Intangible Asset Valuator — how individual asset valuations roll up in the Value Drivers Register into a single, defensible portfolio view ready for boards, investors, lenders, and acquirers.
Read more →
A step-by-step guide to the Opagio Intangible Asset Valuator — covering 63 asset types, the five IFRS 3 asset classes, and 7 valuation methods. Learn how to identify, assess, and value the intangible assets that drive your company's worth.
Read more →
A practical guide to populating the Opagio Intangible Asset Valuator with real financial data — the Xero connection, CSV uploads from any other system, the chart-of-accounts mapping layer, and how the same source feeds every valuation method.
Read more →The Productivity Measurement Gap: Why GDP Per Hour Worked No Longer Tells the Full Story
Traditional productivity metrics were designed for an economy dominated by physical capital and tangible output. In a world where the most valuable firms derive their competitive advantage from software, data, brand equity, and organizational know-how, those metrics are increasingly unreliable. Here is why the gap matters — and what we should do about it.
Read more →Get the latest insights on intangible asset growth and productivity delivered to your inbox.
Take the free intangible asset assessment to see where your business stands across Opagio 12.