Managing Intellectual Capital: Organizational, Strategic, and Policy Dimensions (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies)

Rating:
Summary: Highly Recommended!
Review: In his preface, author David J. Teece promises a theoretical framework for understanding intellectual property and practical advice about managing it. Theory ultimately prevails in this book, but valuable nuggets of managerial guidance await any entrepreneur willing to dig for them. As a professor and as the presenter of Oxford's Clarendon Lecture in Management Studies, from which this book is drawn, Teece naturally tends toward abstract thinking. Some of the territory has been traveled before (i.e. the message that bureaucratic, hierarchical organizations tend to stifle innovation) but Teece adds a lot of intriguing material. We [...] believe analytically minded academics, entrepreneurs and executives will find Teece's volume illuminating, most notably his educated perspective on antitrust activism in the high tech arena. He concludes that government regulators should probably stick to regulating industries they understand. Well, if they want to understand intellectual property, they should start here.


Rating:
Summary: Provocative theoretical perspectives, some well-worn
Review: This is an excellent book on the knowledge-based view of the firm. Although Teece is unsure in his preface whoether is succesfully addresses both academic audiences and managers. From an academic perspective, I can surely claim that this book is theoretically interesting. I recognized two portions of this book that draw heavily on Teece's work published previously in California Management Review (parts of Chapter 1 and all of chapter 4). What is certainly most interesting out of the 300 pages of small type is Section 2. This section provides a compelling set of arguments on the impact of market structures and governance modes on intellectual capital. Notabily missing, however, is incorporation of the knowledge-integration perspective that Grant et. al have been building for the past half decade. The case study on Pilkinton Glass is also well worn, and Teece clearly acknowledges that. Information technologists should not hold thier breath because this work seems to take a rather passive stand on the role of IT in mobilizing intellectual assets. The references at the end provide an impressive array of literature in economics that Teece draws on. The readibility and plausibility of Teece's arguments should come as no surprise to anyone who has read Teece's earlier scholarly work. Overall, I'd say that this was worth the thirty five dollars.

Rating:
Summary: Managing Intellectual Capital. What, how and by whom?
Review: You are about to realize a misconception between two related but different terms: intellectual capital and intellectual property. Browsing throughout the book you will hardly find any references to intellectual capital, including a brief definition! Thus you should not be surprised by not finding any reference to intellectual capital in the Index. One would expect some heated discussion over this controversial concept before being offered a framework to manage it. Forget it. Despite author's attempt to write about the promising field of IC all sections seem to converge around the intellectual property discussion. The management of intellectual capital is something else than the management of intellectual capital. The wrong audiences may than be easily caught in this trap.