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31.10.05

OECD policy conference in Ferrara

Last week, I have been to the OECD policy conference ’Intellectual Assets and Innovation: Value creation in the Knowledge Econcomy’. On the one side, it was interesting to meet many of the leading academics in this field, on the other hand, this conference was disappointing since this community seemed to me as highly isolated from real business impact. Baruch Lev was one of the exceptions to this, and I really like his reasoning and questioning during the sessions.

Some interesting thoughts from the speakers:
. Hal R. Varian termed distributed small offices ’Micro-Multinationals’
. Several Japanes speakers stressed the link between CSR and intangible capital reporting
. Robert M. Hunt spoke about the link between innovation rates and job density (through knowledge spillovers)
. Alison Thomas introduced the audience to the Schroder experiment and the XBRL standard. The XBRL standard is meant to ’provide an identifying tag for each individual item of data. This is computer readable. For example, company net profit has its own unique tag.’

Baruch Lev made an interesting point at the farewell panel: interest in intangible assets reporting in the US is almost non-existent. For instance, the financial accounting standards board (FASB) has released a note, that they have put the propsal ’Disclosures About Intangible Assets’ on ice:
’This project was inactive and at its January 14, 2004 meeting, the Board removed this project from its research agenda.’

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