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 Opagio Intangibles Questionnaire was built to close that gap. It takes a structured approach to mapping your company's intangible asset portfolio across The Opagio 12 value drivers, scoring maturity in each area, and producing an actionable report that connects what you have to what it means for revenue, EBITDA, and valuation.
This guide walks through how the questionnaire works, what the results tell you, and how to use them.
The Intangible Asset Valuator and the Productivity Calculator are quantitative tools. They take financial inputs and produce numerical outputs — asset valuations, GVA, EBITDA, TFP. They answer the question: what is this worth?
The Intangibles Questionnaire answers a different question: what do you actually have?
Before you can value an asset, you need to know it exists. 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, potentially bankable 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 is designed to surface assets that businesses own but do not see. It works as a structured discovery process — education first, scoring second — so that the subsequent valuation and measurement steps are built on a complete picture, not a partial one.
The three tools work together in a deliberate sequence, mirroring the first three steps of The Opagio Method:
| Step | Tool | Question It Answers |
|---|---|---|
| Discover | Intangibles Questionnaire | What intangible assets does this business hold? How mature is each one? |
| Assess | Productivity Calculator | How productively is the business converting inputs into outputs? Where is TFP growth coming from? |
| Value | Intangible Asset Valuator | What is each identified asset worth in economic terms? Which valuation method applies? |
The questionnaire is organised around The Opagio 12 — Opagio's proprietary taxonomy of 12 strategic value drivers that represent the full spectrum of intangible assets in a modern business. Each driver maps to a cluster of related assets, and each has its own set of assessment questions.
| # | Value Driver | What It Covers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Brand & Reputation | Recognition, trust, market positioning, digital brand equity |
| 2 | Customer Capital | Relationships, contracts, loyalty, retention dynamics |
| 3 | Network Effects & Platforms | Ecosystem value, platform dynamics, marketplace effects |
| 4 | Technology & Innovation | Patents, proprietary tech, R&D pipeline, AI/ML capabilities |
| 5 | Data & Intelligence | Proprietary data sets, analytics capabilities, data monetisation |
| 6 | Human Capital | Talent quality, retention, institutional knowledge, team depth |
| 7 | Organisational Capital | Processes, documentation, management systems, operational maturity |
| 8 | Ecosystem & Partnerships | Partner networks, channel relationships, supplier dependencies |
| 9 | Content & IP | Copyrights, publications, training materials, thought leadership |
| 10 | Regulatory & Compliance Capital | Licences, certifications, regulatory moats, compliance maturity |
| 11 | Switching Costs & Lock-In | Customer stickiness, integration depth, migration barriers |
| 12 | Culture & Ways of Working | Innovation speed, collaboration patterns, adaptability, founder dependency |
Three of these drivers — Human Capital, Organisational Capital, and Culture — have no classification under IFRS 3 or ASC 805. They represent the hidden 60–80% of intangible value that traditional accounting standards simply do not capture. This is precisely why the questionnaire exists: to make visible what financial statements miss.
For each of The Opagio 12 drivers, the questionnaire asks targeted questions that assess maturity across several dimensions. The questions are not abstract — they are grounded in the operational reality of running a business.
The Brand & Reputation section does not ask "How strong is your brand?" — a question that invites guesswork. Instead, it asks specific, measurable questions:
Each answer maps to a maturity level, from nascent (the asset exists in embryonic form) through to optimised (the asset is actively managed, measured, and contributing to growth).
The technology questions probe the depth and defensibility of your technical assets:
A SaaS company investing 22% of revenue in R&D with a proprietary data pipeline and three pending patents would score highly on Technology & Innovation. The same company might score poorly on Organisational Capital if its processes are undocumented and founder-dependent. The questionnaire surfaces both — the strength and the gap.
Navigate to the Intangibles Questionnaire. No account is required to begin — you can start exploring immediately. The assessment opens with a brief orientation to The Opagio 12 framework, then guides you through each driver in sequence.
For each of the 12 value drivers, you will answer 3–6 targeted questions. The questions use a mix of formats — multiple choice, scaled responses, and yes/no — designed to take no more than 60–90 seconds per driver.
The interface is designed around progressive disclosure. You see one driver at a time, with a clear progress indicator showing where you are in the assessment. There is no need to complete all 12 in one sitting — your progress is preserved.
Once you have completed the assessment, the questionnaire generates a structured results report. This includes:
The results link directly to the next steps in The Opagio Method. Each identified asset maps to the relevant section of the Intangible Asset Valuator, where you can apply the appropriate valuation methodology — whether that is Relief from Royalty for your brand, MPEEM for your customer relationships, or Replacement Cost for your assembled workforce.
The questionnaire report is structured to be immediately useful — not just a score, but a map for action.
Each driver is scored on a four-level maturity scale:
| Level | What It Means | Typical Characteristics |
|---|---|---|
| Nascent | The asset exists in embryonic form | Undocumented, unmanaged, unrecognised as an asset |
| Developing | The asset is growing but not yet measured | Some awareness, informal management, no valuation |
| Established | The asset is recognised and actively managed | Documented, measured, contributing to business outcomes |
| Optimised | The asset is a strategic weapon | Actively managed for growth, valued, positioned for investors/acquirers |
The most valuable output is often the gap analysis. Most businesses discover a pattern: two or three drivers 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 "Optimised" on Technology & Innovation and Data & Intelligence, but "Nascent" on Organisational Capital and Culture. The technology assets are strong. But if the company's processes are undocumented and its knowledge lives in the heads of three engineers, those technology assets carry significant key-person risk — a factor that directly impacts 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 surfaces the intangible assets they have built — often without realising it — and connects those assets to the financial metrics their boards and investors care about. For founders preparing for a funding round or exit, the questionnaire provides the language and structure to articulate what makes the business valuable beyond revenue and EBITDA.
CFOs and finance directors use it to identify assets that should be on the management agenda, even if accounting standards do not require them on the balance sheet. The questionnaire highlights where intangible value is being created (or destroyed) and provides the basis for a more complete internal reporting framework.
PE operating partners and investors use it as a portfolio screening tool. Running the questionnaire across multiple portfolio companies produces a comparable maturity profile that highlights which companies have the strongest intangible asset positions — and which need intervention before exit.
M&A advisors and due diligence teams use it as a pre-diligence discovery tool. Before commissioning a formal purchase price allocation, the questionnaire identifies the full scope of intangible assets that should be in scope for valuation.
The Intangibles Questionnaire is not a standalone tool. It is the entry point to a complete intangible asset management workflow — The Opagio Method.
The five steps of The Opagio Method are:
The questionnaire covers steps 1 and 2. It identifies what you have and scores how strong it is. The output feeds directly into step 3 — valuation — where the Valuator's 6 methods can be applied to each identified asset.
A logistics company completes the questionnaire and discovers it has strong Customer Capital (long-term contracts, low churn) and significant Regulatory & Compliance Capital (operating licences that take 18 months to obtain). Neither of these appeared on the company's balance sheet. Using the Valuator, the customer relationships are valued at £2.4M using the MPEEM method, and the operating licences are valued at £800K using the With-and-Without method. These figures now appear in investor materials and the data room — directly impacting the exit narrative.
The Intangibles Questionnaire is free to use and requires no sign-up to begin. Navigate to opag.io/explore/questionnaire, select your first value driver, and start the assessment. The full process takes approximately 10 minutes.
For companies that want to go further — saving results, tracking maturity over time, running the assessment across multiple business units, or connecting results to the Valuator and Growth Platform — the Opagio Growth Platform provides persistent storage, portfolio views, and benchmarking against industry peers.
If you have completed the questionnaire and want to discuss your results, contact the Opagio team for a complimentary review session.
Ivan Gowan is the CEO of Opagio. He previously spent 15 years at IG Group (LSE: IGG), where he was part of the senior leadership team during the company's growth from £300m to £2.7bn — a transformation driven overwhelmingly by intangible assets. He holds an MSc in neural networks from the University of Edinburgh (2001).
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