Intellectual capital is a fundamental requisite for financial capital.
Online learning can significantly help in acquiring intellectual capital, and hence build financial capital from it. But what is the definition of intellectual capital? Where can it be found? How does it work? And, how can it be leveraged in a company environment to get the maximum benefit?
Defining Intellectual Capital
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
~ Benjamin Franklin
An organization’s intellectual capital is simply the sum total of the company’s knowledge. But where does it lie? It lies with each and every employee in your organization and in the inter-relationship between them. Just like financial capital is all the money that the company has, plus the value of all the assets that the company owns; intellectual capital is all the knowledge that the workforce has both as individuals and as a team.
What makes Intellectual Capital Significant?
Sometimes, what one can see is hypothetical, and the one that is invisible is actually significant.
A popular belief is that companies with big names have bigger finances with which they make even bigger investments to get the best returns. This is only half-the-truth or maybe, only hypothetically true. Have you ever wondered why skilled and talented people work mostly for the bigger companies? This is because no business in the world would be able to work without the knowledge that resides within the brains of its employees. Intellectual capital, therefore, is directly proportional to business success.
Enhancing Intellectual Capital with Online Learning
Formidable names in the market, like Toyota, Walmart, and Microsoft invest about $130bn in training every year.
Invest on acquiring intellectual capital that will bring financial capital and consequently, business success. Sounds simple! Isn’t it?
In companies all over the globe, 70 per cent corporate and online learning initiatives are a failure.
The reason why these efforts fail is the inability of learning and development strategies to evolve with time, and continuing with the traditional practices that have become either obsolete, or have lost their significance. A company’s intellectual capital is locked up in the brains of its employees. The mistake that most of the training and development programs commit is to deliver knowledge to the teams rather than first unlocking and dispersing the knowledge to the workforce that is already residing within the company.
A LEARNING TIP: In the initial stages of corporate training, it is better to create a dialogue between the employees rather than imposing knowledge in the form of training delivery.
The Importance of Collaborative Learning
There are two significant findings, recently, in a workplace survey with respect to corporate trainings:
First, only 37 per cent employees, all over the globe, believed that corporate training is vital.
Second, about 90 per cent believed that collaboration and social learning programs must be promoted in the corporate training space.
These two statistics imply a more collaborative approach in learning and development. And the inference drawn from it is that intellectual capital is significantly dependent on social ties within an organization. These social ties let employees come together and share information to create new information thus strengthening the knowledge repository within the organization and enhancing its intellectual capital. Therefore, the importance of complementing technology training with social learning cannot be undermined and must be promoted at any cost.
Summing it up:
A company’s intellectual capital plays a key role in ensuring business success. Apart from introducing cutting-edge training deliverables for the workforce, companies must also focus upon encapsulating and sharing knowledge that resides within the individuals making up the workforce. A collaborative learning approach must be an integral part of online training to enhance the intellectual capital and thus, increase the revenue.
Cognixia is an e-learning and digital transformation fosterer with a wide-range of courses for students, individuals, and corporate workforce. We blend our corporate training strategies with both latest trends and collaborative approaches that augment a company’s intellectual capital. With industry-certified expert trainers and state-of-the-art infrastructure, we try our best to ensure customizability, and instill creative approaches to make the learning process flourish.
