Dean's Message丨Tackling the Deficit of Our Intangible Assets

Tackling the Deficit of 

Our Intangible Assets

ZIBS的无形资产：赤字挑战与投资机遇

Since we moved to our brand-new building recently, we have been proudly showing our visitors the ZIBS building as the most tangible and visible hallmark of ZIBS as a school. While our investment in this physical building is critical and very much "tangibly" valuable, we need to focus on an even more important area that we have so far underappreciated and underinvested: The Intangible Assets.

Over the last 25 years, a prominent trend in the business world has been the increasing importance of "intangible assets", as compared to tangible assets such as physical and financial assets. More advanced economies and leading institutions spend more on investments in intangible assets than tangible assets. There are many definitions of intangible assets, and I find the following one most pertinent: "The intangible assets consist of patents, skilled workforce, software, know-hows, strong customer relationships, brands, and unique organizational skills". The importance of intangible assets is most pronounced in the capital markets: the valuation of companies. Today, the vast diversity of price/book (PB) ratio and price/earnings (PE) ratio of public companies is driven mainly by their different levels of intangible assets.

Though we, as a business school, are not like a listed company that can be measured with those valuation ratios, we should and must be practicing cutting-edge business practices and pioneering market trends in order to better connect the world and shape the future. Unfortunately, as a business school, we have relatively few patents or proprietary software (we should, of course, strive to have more) as our intangible assets. So, what are the more important "intangible assets" for business schools, and how should we invest in and improve the value of these intangible assets? What are the most important intangible assets for ZIBS and how are they different from our peers? How are we doing with these intangible assets? How will we improve the value of our intangible assets?

I shall share with you my perspectives on the following aspects: our brand, our partnerships, our processes and policies, and our people.

Our Brand

我们的品牌

《高势能品牌》

By Eden Yin, associate Professor in Marketing, Cambridge Judge Business School

We are blessed with being an integral part of the globally renowned Zhejiang University. We must care deeply about and add value to the ZJU brand, which is the umbrella and foundation of ZIBS brand. ZJU brand is the most important intangible asset for ZIBS and it will be foolish if we do not (know how to) effectively leverage the most important asset we have. From day one of ZIBS’ inception, we had a keen awareness of the brand and thus created a unique ZIBS brand that is easy for people to recognize, remember and recite. Needless to say, ZIBS’ brand must be such that we contribute to the positive advancement of ZJU brand, especially in a more global context, as one of ZIBS’ missions is to help accelerate the globalization of ZJU. The questions for us all are: in everything each and every one of us does every day, is what we do helping or hurting ZIBS and ZJU brands? The answer is no, or not all the time. Is the current ZIBS brand properly reflecting our core values and advancing missions? The answer is no, or not yet! We may have a brand, but our brand is far from powerful; we have established a team for Brand Communication, but our expertise and experiences in this field are far from ideal; we have stressed the importance of (establishing) ZIBS brand, but not everyone knows what it means to him or her, nor does he/she know clearly how to contribute. This is a gap that we have noticed and will address.

Our Partnerships

我们的伙伴关系

The quality and quantity of external partnerships reflect the organizational capabilities and skills, and represent the influence and impact of the organization, which combined is an important part of the intangible assets. 

As a strong believer in and practical builder of ecosystem, ZIBS has established an ecosystem of external partnerships that is considered broad and diverse by many standards: we have created a network of university partnerships with nearly 100 universities across all continents; we have established dialogue channels and collaboration with many leading global institutions: The World Bank Group, New Development Bank, UN, CFA Institute, Johnson Controls, HSBC, Ant Group…; we have served our communities and partners with earnest and energy through various platforms like Beijing FIRST (Frontier Institute of Regulations & Supervision Technology), Haining Academy, and Zhejiang Association of FinTech. The depth and diversity of our ecosystem is a key competitive advantage and an important "intangible asset" of ZIBS. We all know that there is a significant opportunity for us to unleash the potential of these partnerships and we all know that we must, but how? That is a question we are still struggling with. While we will continue to grow the number of our partnerships, it will be an even more important priority for us to raise the quality of such partnerships.

Our Processes & Procedures 

我们的流程

As a young and fast-growing institution, we have been emphasizing the importance of entrepreneurship and innovation, "loath" to the so-called processes and procedures as we forge ahead with our ambitious and unconventional initiatives. As a "rebel and revolutionary" from within, ZIBS is an alien to the existent processes and procedures of the university and we are grateful for the university’s tolerance towards us for the sake of development and innovation. We have underinvested in the processes and policies – an important intangible asset and a key organizational pillar for ZIBS. All of us know that we must quickly establish efficient and effective processes in order to sustain our growth, scale up our operations, and grow up as an organization. Smart policies, procedures, and processes are and will continue to be a priority for everyone, and it is critical for us to achieve theZIBS multiplier effect we have always aimed for, and for everything we do at ZIBS: from MEDIA, SMART to FAITH, cutting across the whole ecosystem and all programs we offer.

Our People

我们的团队

As clearly stated in the definition, skilled workforce is a key component of intangible assets. They are also a key pillar and driver behind everything we want to achieve. We have been blessed with the phenomenal growth, from the number of programs we offer and students we educate to the size of Team ZIBS: our staff and scholars, but we have been running a significant deficit in human capital. While we have been fairly successful in attracting many young talents, and many of them have been performing well in their positions, there are significant discrepancies and deficits in terms of relevant experiences and required skills in all our teams throughout our ecosystem. We will continue to grow our team, but we have not invested nearly enough and will prioritize rolling out systematic training for our colleagues, from the onboarding of our new staff to the upgrading of skills for our existing team members. We have noticed this exciting opportunity, which is why we have identified "building a learning organization" as one of the top 10 priorities for this year. We are designing various training programs and have reached out for outside help as well.

Tackling the intangible asset deficit challenge requires a systems approach and participation from all team members, from the top down to the bottom up, from all departments and divisions of our ecosystem. It also takes long-term planning and consistent investments, so certain patience is a must, as is certain balancing between short-term results and long-term strategic objectives. More importantly, it takes self-awareness, collective determination, and decisive actions to achieve this. This is not easy for any organization; just look at the numerous failing institutions around us (my recent talk at the Global Wealth Management Forum organized by Caijing财经论坛 illustrates how the proud bankers are even struggling with this).

But I am confident we can do it, because we are ZIBS! 

Editor｜LI Songjiao

Managing Editor｜CHENQI Lisha

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