The Business of Intangibles

Since 2015, I conducted dozens of interviews with people running conferences. My intent was to write a book on how to put together good events.

The project took an unexpected turn when I extended the scope to festivals, think tanks, schools, museums, hotels. 

This led me to uncover one of the most useful idea I’ve ever come across : that all these organisations are platforms manipulating the world’s most precious assets : relationships, attention, information, experience, identity and capital.

This article explains the key ideas, and proposes tools to allow you to use this framework in your own context. 

Key findings

The Olympics, SxSW, Lolapalooza, Montreux Comedy Festival, MOMA, Burning Man, all these institutions are in the same business : facilitating the circulation of intangibles assets within their community of influence.

Despite being invisible and hard to measure, these assets are what we gather, build, grow and trade on a daily basis.

These assets are relationships, attention, identity, information and experience. Together with capital, they are the blood of 21st century organisations, what allows them to function, grow, and differentiate.  

Seeing the intangible

The assets

Despite the absence of effective ways to identify and measure those assets, they are all around us all the time as the previous examples show. The 6 assets are.

Identity

A positive boost to someone’s reputation and social status, coming from a transfer or endorsement from the platform. Burning Man mints Burners, Harvard mints Harvardians.

Capital

Cash, securities, tokens. An essential, central, yet boring and indistinctive asset. Often the easiest to trade because of its measurability and interoperability.

Flows

Let’s look at what happens inside an event we all know : the Olympics. Let’s focus on 4 key stakeholders : athletes, television, sports federations and sponsors. 

⚠️ WORK IN PROGRESS ⚠️

A framework for your projects

Let’s put this framework in motion for your project.

Use cases :

• I’m an incubator, what should I offer concretely?
• I’m a government actor, how can I support innovation concretely?
• I’m an investor, how can I stand out from the competition by offering more than money?
• I run a think tank, what do I sell concretely?
• fundsraising for event
• building an incubator from scratch
• running a museum
• person : works really well with an individual
• speaker who needs to find value in an unpaid invitation

Contributors