A Portfolio Approach to Intellectual Capital Development
Best–selling books, Harvard Business Review articles, substantive white papers and other publications have helped our clients win millions of dollars in new business. However, many professional services firms find these kinds of results elusive, and instead find themselves spending substantial amounts of money on too many ideas, most of which fail to deliver growth.
One way to get more out of marketing investments is by taking a portfolio management approach: collecting, assessing, developing and writing about a balanced array of ideas to ensure that the firm has the right mix between short–term bets (ideas ready to market now) and long–term bets (ideas needing more extensive development). Doing so supports demand generation in the current quarter as well as over a year or multiple–year period.
Implementing this approach to a firm’s publications involves four basic steps: topic identification, topic assessment, idea development and portfolio balancing. In this paper we explain each of these steps in detail.