The intellectual capital of big tech companies and startups
If I diverge from this topic of the intellectual capital of big tech startups and companies it is probably because of these articles about convergent and divergent thinking that I have been reading before but at the same time that’s from this reading experience that this article comes from because reading them reminded me of this book entitled the cultural capital from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and made me think about how tech companies and startups are managing this intellectual capital because as crazy it could be knowledge and idea are currency like dollars and financial assets like stocks and options. Like with financial assets holding proportions of many kinds of knowledge is a way to balance a portfolio and make it less volatile but unlike financial assets, a portfolio of several kinds of knowledge (an intellectual portfolio) always compound and provide more profitable new ideas and solutions. I tried to look at how big tech companies and startups are actually managing their intellectual capital? are they diversifying and weighting the many knowledge assets that can compound and province more intellectual capital that for me always lead to more solutions that benefit these startups and companies?
My opinion is that a big tech company or a startup should always try to build teams of people with different kinds of domain knowledge and this is more true when it is about knowledge working roles like programmers, physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, scientists, design thinkers, public accountants, lawyers, editors, and academics. A startup may not have enough capital to implement this but a big tech company should always have teams of knowledge workers built with software engineers and knowledge workers of other sectors and these knowledge workers should be given the best way and opportunity to communicate with the many engineers that a tech company use to have because this would ignite new ideas and help engineers spot sector-driven tech solutions that they may not see without this communication with this domain knowledge worker and better the tech company should incite and promote engineers who help these knowledge workers have all the tools they need to build there own ideas without the need of a complex tool that needs mastering engineering skills that could only be acquired in years of learning and experience. Cross-functional teams are very important for sure. I have been writing about the importance of cross-functional teams and cross-functional talents but Cross Intellectual Teams are the most important kind of teams for a big tech company like Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Amazon, Google, eBay, Paypal, and all these tech startups that came after these ones and these cross intellectual teams should be given the tool and power to not only produces theories and make researches that will stay on documents but really have the medium for building and prototyping things with the engineers and better these teams will be if they are funded spin-offs of the parent big tech companies.
My questions of the first paragraph of this article are still pending to be answered by myself because I am not an insider or employee of the big tech companies nor a famous tech journalist like kara swisher who know the ins and outs of big tech companies other than they are nice and interesting places to work in where workers have really freedom of thought and actions for innovations but it sounds like how I am imagining a cross intellectual team is not manifested in any tech company that I know about but I may be wrong because I don’t know everything about them. An example of these cross intellectual teams that I am writing about is a team made of programmers, physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, scientists, design thinkers, public accountants, lawyers, editors, and academics,… and any other knowledge worker roles as long as the big tech companies have enough capital to pay them until they produce and build these great ideas that will be the next core business of the big tech company and I bet that these kinds of cross-intellectual teams will surprisingly and fastly and hugely be profitable to the big tech company that will build them and gives them the opportunity to express their domain-specific skills while always keeping technology as the core of the work they do.
It should be a way to make a deeper analysis of the intellectual capital of big tech companies and to study the impact of this intellectual capital on their growth and success and the impact that this intellectual capital will have in the future but this is a complex thing that I could not add in my list of things to do because of its complexity and because of my poor knowledge about the big tech companies from inside but I am sure that if you want you could do it and answer to these question that I asked myself. I you do I hope that I would have the opportunity to know about it.
PS: the Wikipedia article I was writing about in the first paragraph are here and here
