The IAFS launched its 2010 membership drive this past week. This is why. On February 28, new US SEC regulations will drive into the boardrooms risk, reputation and intangible asset management. 

You have a decision. Will you be at the table or on the menu?

These regs mean that every board member, in fact every top executive, can expect major new challenges. Members of the Intangible Asset Finance Society (IAFS) will be prepared. Here’s how:

1. Thought Leadership. The IAFS is the only interdisciplinary Society of professionals committed to the financial exploitation of intangible assets. That translates into enhanced pricing power; lower operating and credit costs; and higher net incomes and earnings multiples.

2. Risk Management. A lost reputation can destroy a firm overnight. IAFS can keep you up to date with risk management strategies for ethics, innovation, quality, safety, environmental sustainability, and security.

3. Preferential Pricing. Society members receive preferential rates for IAFS products at our new store and discounted registration to various professional meetings. Discounted registrations for the March ICAP Ocean Tomo meeting in San Francisco and the June IP Business Congress in Munich, for example, are now offered.

4. Incentive Premium. Sign on for your academic or corporate membership including payment by March 15 and receive a complementary copy of the IAFS’s latest book, Mission: Intangible. Managing risk and reputation to create enterprise value (a $29.95 value).

Click here to learn how our strengths in Thought Leaders and Risk Management, financial benefits such preferential pricing, and premiums such as the book shown at right make joining the Society today an offer you can't refuse.

Among the educational resources offered by the Society are the Mission:Intangible® Monthly Briefings. These one hour events comprise about 45 minutes of prepared remarks backed up by presentation materials, and about 15 minutes of responses to questions submitted by listeners. Often, because of time constraints, there are questions leftover.

The 8 January 2010 Mission: Intangible Monthly Briefing comprising a robust panel of Society committee chairs evoked many questions. As promised, here are some of the leftovers.

QUESTION TO CATHY REESE: Your comments about the concept of director's duty of oversight driving greater attention to intangibles management are intriguing. Must a new area like this be built case by case or can there be a catalyst that speeds up the process (such a new set of laws and/or regulations). Is this reasonable to expect in the space of the next ten years?

ANSWER: Directors and officers currently have an affirmative duty under Delaware fiduciary law to oversee and monitor corporate assets and liabilities. Delaware's highest court has said that directors and officers can be held personally liable for losses suffered by the corporation as a result of their inattention. That court has also said that directors violate this duty by failing to (i) implement "reporting and information systems and controls" designed to ferret out such risks and report them on a timely basis to the board, or (ii) failing to monitor and update such systems and controls and thus ignore red flags that can lead to corporate liability. The losses engendered by one patent infringement suit can be enormous, particularly in a wilful infringement suit where damages may be trebled because the company "wilfully" continued to infringe when it knew or should have known of the infringement. I believe that the catalyst that will speed up the process and lead to nationwide awareness that this body of law applies to IP or IA risks and losses, would be one shareholder suit against corporate directors seeking to recover from them personally these infringement damages. Another route might be a shareholder suit to recover market losses for director and officer failure to monitor or address reputational risks before they damaged the value of the company. Shareholder actions for breaches of fiduciary duties by director and officers that are filed in the Delaware Chancery Court receive nationwide attention from corporate lawyers and the boards that they advise and can lead to instant changes in board focus.

Cathy L. Reese, Esq.
Fish & Richardson P.C.

QUESTION TO MARK LUCIER: In your presentation, you made reference to “IA-based financial products and investment vehicles.” How do we position these products so as to avoid being tainted by the recent financial derivatives debacle?

ANSWER: When I was talking about financial products and investment vehicles, what I was referring to was inventing new ways to "ring fence" intangible assets and the risks associated with them, thereby enabling investors to own or finance those assets or bear those risks. The creativity and complexity, then, is more about how we isolate the assets and risk than in how we slice, dice and allocate cash flows among various classes of investors.....think of it more as creating an intangible asset tracking stock or risk-linked security than as engineering a multi-tranche royalty-based CDO or securitization. Alternatively, to the extent we're able to quantify value & risk associated with intangibles, and further, if we can somehow link that to more traditional measures of financial or equity value and risk, then that could serve as the basis for a financial product that enables a company or its outside investors to share in the value being created by the company's intangibles or to hedge against the risk associated with those intangibles.

Of course, your point is well taken that regulators and the general public are skeptical of (read: hostile toward) anything that requires more than one or two boxes and arrows to describe its structure. A financial product's purpose should be plainly evident to those on Main Street and not just to those of us on Wall Street. If we are to be successful in creating these instruments and having them be broadly accepted, our driving motivation needs to be a focus on creating something that funnels capital to intangible assets to support and encourage innovation, rather than on cleverly shuffling the capital structure deck and obfuscating the instrument's true purpose. If we approach the creation of new financial products from that perspective, then "positioning" what we've created will simply be about highlighting the substantive economic benefits, rather than hiding something from the regulators or the Wall Street Journal.

Marc Lucier
Deutsche Bank

Operating costs such as internal frictional costs are the bane of any executive accountable for the bottom line. True, they can be cut – usually through workforce reductions – but the long-term effects on surviving employees may include net losses in productivity and even greater internal frictional costs.

Here is good news, executives. There is a proven strategy for lowering internal frictional costs. This is it. Be ethical. Be sustainable. Be safe. And be known for it.

In other words, all you need to do is apply the best practices found in other companies that are superior stewards of their intangible assets – the business processes that lead to reputations for ethics, safety, quality, innovation, security, and sustainability. Companies that follow these practices tend to out perform their peers and better reward their shareholders.

The relationship between these business processes, reputation, internal frictional costs, and value creation are illustrated on a webpage of one of our members, Steel City Re, a leader in risk and reputation management. The latest data affirming these principles comes from Kelly Services, Inc. (NASDAQ: KELYA, KELYB), a world leader in workforce management services and human resources solutions.

According to the Kelly study announced late last month,

Major public issues such as a company’s reputation for strong ethical practices have become critical factors in choosing where to work, even to the point where many employees are prepared to sacrifice pay or promotion in order to work for organizations that are actively engaged in good social responsibility practices. More specifically, concerns about ethical behavior outweigh concerns about the environment by all generations, when making employment choices.

Here are some other key findings:

• Almost 90 percent of respondents say they are more likely to work for an organization that is considered ethically and socially responsible, something that is consistent across all age generations.
• 80 percent are more likely to work for an organization that is considered environmentally responsible, a figure that is considerably higher among older age groups.
• In deciding where to work, an organization’s reputation for ethical conduct is considered ‘very important’ by 65 percent of Gen Y, 72 percent of Gen X, and 77 percent of baby boomers.
• 46 percent of Gen Y would be prepared to forego pay or promotion to work for an organization with a good reputation, rising to 48 percent for Gen X and 53 percent for baby boomers.
• In deciding where to work, policies to address global warming are considered ‘very important’ by 31 percent of Gen Y, rising to 35 percent among Gen X and 36 percent for baby boomers.

Here's the action part. Want to cut operating costs? Ramp up your company’s reputation for ethics, sustainability, safety, etc. Become a superior risk and reputation manager.

Want to know how to do it? Join the Intangible Asset Finance Society. We provide a forum for executives to discover better ways to increase the visibility, transparency, and value of intangible assets. These assets comprise 50% of the average company's value. Click here for information on membership and affiliate with us on LinkedIn.

The Society's mission is to increase the visibility, transparency, and positive impact of intangible asset finance through education, the promulgation of standards, and advocacy. The Athena Alliance, a friend of the Society, specializes in advocacy. Its President, Ken Jarboe, provided us with the following:

As innovative companies struggle to raise funds, intellectual property and intangible assets are providing alternative ways of financing innovation. But greater awareness of them as an asset class is needed. Raising that awareness is the focus of a new report from Athena Alliance, Maximizing Intellectual Property and Intangible Assets: Case Studies in Intangible Asset Finance by Ian Ellis, a former U.S. Department of Commerce official specializing in intellectual property and international trade.

The report outlines increasing, but still nascent, means of financing innovation based on these assets in public, private and venture capital markets. As industry has invested capital in research and development to develop new technology and advance other creative activities, intellectual capital has become a valuable asset class, according to the paper. In response, firms specializing in intangible-based financing are springing up, using them to raise capital for the next round of innovation.

The paper details equity, equity-debt, debt, and sale-leaseback transactions, both private and public, that have helped companies raise capital, based on careful, rigorous analysis and conservative underwriting standards. For example, the author notes that in 2000, there were two public deals using royalty securitization, raising $145 million. In 2007-08, $3.3 billion was raised in 19 deals.

Unlike some of the exotic financial vehicles, however, the financial products discussed in this paper are some of the most basic financing mechanisms in business. The innovation is in recognizing the value of intangible assets for corporate finance. These new financial firms are using traditional financial techniques in new ways to help innovative companies.

But more should be done.

One important step would be developing sound, industry-wide, underwriting standards, according to the report. For example, Small Business Administration (SBA) rules permit its loans to be used for acquisition of intangible assets when buying on-going businesses. Rules are unclear on whether those assets can be used as collateral. The paper recommends that SBA work with commercial lenders to develop standards for using intangible assets as collateral.

The report builds on earlier Athena Alliance papers, notably Intangible Asset Monetization: The Promise and the Reality.

The objectives of the Intangible Asset Finance Society are to increase the visibility, transparency, and value of intangible assets through education, advocacy, and the promulgation of standards. Leverage is a common instrument of value deployment, and IP as collateral is one of several favorite topics among Society members. Which is why we couldn't pass the opportunity to share this note on an IP secured loan-gone-bad.

Celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, who has photographed everyone from the Rolling Stones to Queen Elizabeth II, put her art, intellectual property and even real estate assets up for collateral last year when she consolidated her massive debts into one $24 million loan.  Leibovitz made her creditor an “irrevocable, exclusive agent” in December 2008 in exchange for the loan at a 12 percent interest rate. The collateral specifically included all photographs she has taken or will take.  Last Tuesday was the deadline for repaying the loan or surrendering the collateral - a deadline not met.

Friday, Bloomberg reported that Liebowitz bought back control to her photographs and real estate by renegotiating the terms of a $24 million loan from Art Capital Group. In return, the lender dropped its lawsuit against her.

The Society is pleased to announce the 28 May 2009 launch of the IP Finance Institute and to welcome the Institute into the Society’s global alliance. The Society also congratulates Pier Biga, managing partner of ICM Advisors, who is Executive Director.



The Intellectual Property Finance Institute is the first European research and competence centre focused on IP Economics & Finance. The Institute is a non-profit organization which promotes and develops know-how transfer, research initiatives and projects about the IP as an economic asset and its use in IP-based financing solutions.

The Institute was co-founded by the Innovation Studies Group of the Politecnico di Torino, a leading international technology university, and ICM Advisors, a leading international advisory and research firm specializing in intangible asset valuation and IP-based financing.

The past week, Intellectual Asset Management magazine, the official publication partner of the Society, has been hosting a debate on intangible asset valuation. As Joff Wild, editor of IAM magazine describes it,

One subject area that always seems to generate a large number of reader comments is valuation. Witness, for example, the fantastic thread tha developed following a post I wrote back in January entitled Intangible values collapse - the old 70% to 80% claim is now officially dead and buried. Among those taking part in that conversation - indeed the man who indirectly inspired it - was Nir Kossovsky, executive secretary of the Intangible Asset Finance Society and CEO of Steel City Re. Now Nir has written in to question some of the points made by Pat Sullivan and Alexander Wurzer in their IAM article on IP/intangible valuation myths, which I recently previewed on the blog.

The Intangible Asset Finance Society has weighed in on the debate along with our colleagues at the Athena Alliance, with classic language and arguments from the school of American Pragmatism that reflect the financial market principles we support. To follow the debate on the IAM site, click here. To read the comments of Ken Jarboe, President of the Athena Alliance on the Alliance blog, Intangible Economy, click here.

Tweens and adolescents often playfully disparage their meals with monikers such as "mystery meat" or "tuna surprise." While this is good fun, it is something quite different when the CEO of a major food products company similarly characterizes his company's products. David McKay of Kellogg Company (NYSE: K) raised a few eyebrows when he testified last month before the House Committeee on Energy and Commerce that Kellogg relied on third parties to assure food safety. We wonder what thoughts ran through the minds of financial analysts who knew at that time that competitors, such as Nestle, conducted their own supplier inspections thereby signalling to their stakeholders that food safety is a core business process and critical intangible/reputation asset.

And while it has been a rough time as of late with Salmonella in peanuts and pistachios, the industry as a whole is settling down to a steady state of intangible asset volatilty. So it piques our interest when H. J. Heinz Company (NYSE: HNZ), a company that has made reputation enhancement a key business strategy, experiences a sudden drop in the Steel City Re Intangible Asset Finance (Corporate Reputation) Index.

The chart below shows Heinz. As seen in the upper chart, among the 56 companies comprising the Food Products Group, Heinz has ranked in the top 95th percentile earlier this year but has been declining and is now at the 83rd percentile. In terms of return on equity, this past year it has outperformed the median of its peers by 2.6% - the peer group having lost a median of about 27% over the past 12 months. As seen in the lower chart, Heinz's exponentially weighted moving average IA index volatility began this last six month period at under two orders of magnitude and is now approaching three orders.


Yet while Heinz is showing a reputation decline and increasing volatilty, the industry as a whole is showing increasing stability. In the upper half of the chart below, the variance amond different companies in the peer group is leveling off at about 0.25. Furthermore, among all 5000 companies tracked by the IA index, the median IA index value of the peer group is rising to about the 72nd percentile. Last, the lower half of the chart below shows that the % of value at the Heinz Company ascribable to intangible assets has been increasing and now stands at about 120% while the median fraction in the peer group has been decling slightly to about 60%.



How is all this to be interpreted: decreasing IA index, increasing EMWA IA index volatilty, increasing IA fraction?

We believe its all about reputation. We believe that the extraordinarily high level of intangible asset value comprising some 120% of the company's market value (implying a negative book value) means stakeholders are relying greatly on extra-financial information to set a fair market price. Stakeholders are going with their gut, and gut is driven by reputation -- the impression stakeholders form on management's stewardship of a firm's intangible assets. The increasing volatilty associated with a decline in the IA index suggests to us that the impression stakeholders are receiving from these extra-fiancial channels is increasingly less uniform. Higher stock price volatility and increasing cost of both equity and debt will be among the earliest pains Heinz may experience.

Not convinced? Google search the stock ticker for Heinz, Kellogg, General Mills (NYSE:GIS), and Ralcorp (NYSE:RAH) - food product companies whose IA index values as of 6 April were .83, .90, .94 and .96 respectively - and the term "reputation." The hit counts are 504, 484, 543, and 1950. Did we mention that Ralcorp also had a peanut recall issue, yet their EWMA IA index volatility is decreasing and their ROE for the year is 23% above the peer-group median?

Dear Reader,

Beginning this week and with surprising regularity, the Society will post a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the intangible asset management implications of a current news story involving a publicly traded company. These analyses will draw on IA index data published by Steel City Re. Periodically, the Society will also post announcements to supplement the monthly news alerts, the quarterly newsletter, and the bimonthly publication in IAM magazine.

As always, the Society welcomes your comments and feedback.

Nir Kossovsky
Executive Secretary