Invisible scientific capital

What it covers

When a company is valued, people look at what it owns: premises, equipment, revenue, sometimes a patent portfolio. For an organisation whose value comes from its research, this reading leaves out what matters most.

Tacit knowledge

Methods, practical know-how and intuitions that are written down nowhere and live only in people's heads. The way to run an experiment, the parameter that needs watching, the reflex that saves three weeks of lost work.

Skills concentrated in a few people

When a critical skill rests on a single profile, that person's departure takes years of expertise away without leaving any usable trace. The risk is the same as the failure of a one-of-a-kind machine, but it is almost never treated as such.

Dormant assets

Prototypes never taken to industrial scale, usable datasets, documented methods, unlicensed patents. They exist, they can be reused, and they are not exploited. Results judged negative or leads set aside are sometimes worth their weight in gold, when reread at the right moment.

Relational capital

Partnerships, publications, visibility among peers. What the outside world really knows about the organisation's work, which is never exactly what the organisation believes it knows.

Why it does not appear on a balance sheet

Accounting standards recognise an intangible asset when it is identifiable, controlled by the company, and generates future economic benefits that can be measured reliably. A team's tacit knowledge meets none of these three conditions in a simple way: it cannot be separated from the people who carry it, it is not documented, and its value cannot be put into figures directly.

It therefore stays off the balance sheet, even when it makes up most of the value of the organisation. It is a blind spot of accounting, not an absence of value.

It is not the same thing as intellectual property

Intellectual property (patents, trademarks, registered software) is the documented and legally protected part of scientific capital. Invisible scientific capital is what remains outside it. An organisation can have considerable scientific capital without holding a single patent and, conversely, hold patents whose scope nobody in-house can explain any more.

How it is measured

Not by estimating it in euros, but by measuring the conditions that make it usable or that make it disappear. This is what the Invisible R&D Capital Index (ICRI) does. It is the self-assessment tool developed by Cortex: 26 factual indicators, entered in an online questionnaire that you complete at your own pace with automatic saving, and spread across five weighted pillars.

The approach produces an overall score out of 100, a sub-score out of 5 for each pillar, a reading level and a decision-oriented interpretive analysis. It works even for organisations that have neither a formal laboratory nor a patent in their name.

What measurement changes

An R&D department knows what it spends and what it publishes. It rarely knows what it holds, what it risks losing, and what it could already valorise.

Measuring makes three things possible. Allocating a research budget on the basis of measured elements rather than habit. Documenting a funding application or a due diligence with a dated and sourced assessment, linked to traceable internal sources. And giving non-scientific stakeholders a shared basis for discussion, on an executive committee as well as with a partner or an investor.

The measurement is then repeated. What matters is not the score but the gap between two measurements: that is what tells you whether the actions taken have had an effect.

The theoretical background

Since 1990, Wesley Cohen and Daniel Levinthal have formalised, under the name of absorptive capacity, the idea that a research organisation's performance depends not only on the volume of knowledge it produces but on its capacity to absorb that knowledge and make it usable.

This is the useful distinction here. Producing knowledge and being able to use it are two different capacities. An organisation can excel at the first and be very weak at the second, and it is precisely this gap that measuring invisible scientific capital makes visible.