I’ve spent some time realizing the value of things that aren’t precious. If you want to know how much a forest or silence on the edge of a river costs, you can’t go to the market and ask. There is no silence in the market, no light pollution, no intrinsic value of a Gothic cathedral. Are there any gothic cathedral markets? So we want to resort to indirect methodologies: to hedonic prices – which estimate how much it is worth for most people to live next to a park across from a highway – or to conditional value, in which we ask people how much they will pay to preserve an ecosystem that will never be repeated. Months of work, economic models, considerations and finally an honest approach. But an honest approximation was better than the silence of balance or an analysis that only benefits from market prices.
The lesson I learned in those years was not technical: it was philosophical. The market can be a good buy but a bad love. It’s used as a tool to make visible what matters, and it’s extremely powerful. Promoted to the supreme arbiter of the value of things is a disaster. Because the market is expensive, it is very different to understand the true or full value of a good, factor or service. Now that history has been understood, so to speak, and that the market has triumphed over all these things, this question is more important than ever. There is no alternative when it comes to being satisfied with production and consumption in the markets, that’s for sure, but we have to deal with the myopia or myopia of these same mechanisms before it’s worth it, and much more, because for various reasons (market failure) we don’t have enough information (prices) with those who manage them rationally.
This confusion between price and value has a long history. Adam Smith it was reported in 1776 with his diamond and water paradox: essential for life in this case nothing; it absolutely necessary costs a fortune. Marx I separated use value from exchange value and advised that the market is expensive with a logic that has very little to do with the actual utility of things. At the beginning of the XX century, Alfred Marshall launched a quantitative revolution by formalizing consumer surplus: there is a gap between what one pays for something and what one actually pays for it, which is pure and invisible value. On discipline Pigou It was the least with me Welfare Economics: the good of society is not limited either to public gas or to market prices, but to the ability to know the real utility of things and the real cost of their production. The costs that the market does not see—the negative externalities that are generated in the processes of production and consumption without anyone paying for it—determine real welfare as much as they themselves. Y GalbraithThen I’ll use the point: conventional economics began by privileging the precision of the unimportant over the imprecision of what really mattered. As it turned out, the ecological economics I was trained in was straight from Pigou. And the problem of business intangibles is the first problem of all this.
Living in an era of metrics, I’ve never tasted perfection (not as well as surviving an apparent contradiction). Everything must be calculated, converted into a pointer that fits into one dashboard. Governments (ours is an exception) are driven by KPIs. Companies are valued at a multiple of EBITDA. On our site, we collect steps and followers that give us a new version of our identity. The sheer obsession is logical – it makes us do things – but it leads to a dangerous conclusion: what doesn’t make it to Excel, disappears from analysis and with it from decision-making (at least that’s what doesn’t believe in quality as the main driver of our incentives, and therefore our buying and selling decisions).
In this Excel, the famous “propuesta de valor”, this disgusting syntagma that can fall, is often used board startups, every presentation to investors and every consultation form that always means everything and nothing at the same time. Companies that actually have something that sets them apart—a consolidated brand, a team that has solved problems that have been solved before, software what no one knows how to answer- You rarely know exactly how much what you have is worth. He understood it. Well, that’s it, but if the scrolls are between the two: in balance, they won’t appear, and without the number, the “value proposition” is where it’s always been: on the slides.
The digital economy has transformed this problem into an urgent one. The most valuable companies on the planet are not created by their factories or fleets. They are because of their brands, their algorithms, their intellectual property, and the communities their elders have built. And here it is best to ask a question that few people ask out loud: What is of greatest value to society today, physical capital, human capital or symbolic capital?
The talent of the team or the brand that surrounds it. Accumulated knowledge or the reputation that knowledge has created. The question is misunderstood, but you will have to answer. Human capital – the talent, skill, ability of solvers – creates innovation. But it is the symbolic capital – the brand, the reputation, the authority in the sector – that amplifies it, defines it and translates it into a permanent competitive phase. A company with talent and reputation is a well-kept secret. A company of reputation and talent is the castle of the arena, and in fact it is pure entelequia. What really matters is the ability to constantly convert one into the other, and this ability to convert is precisely the intangible of the intangibles. It will appear on the scale right now.
There’s an irony that ROI evangelists prefer not to mention: the same industry that has built a religion that supports inversion returns has allowed us to calculate the ROI of its most valuable assets. What is the value of the brand of a company with three years of experience in the market? How long does the rebuild take? The usual answer in itself would be encouragement from men: “It is very difficult to meditate.” Because the difficulty was an excuse not to bring it. However, I always had dreams of eating the fruit and calling upon my sense of smell and experience to decide that the thing was of great value to the eye of a good cube. See the tortuous rationale behind the publicity and marketing campaigns for defenders through a range of dishonest practices.
We promised an economy of abundance. infinite data, software replicable with finned candle, info on phone page. And in part it is certain: code is copied in seconds, artificial intelligence models are learned with all published, the marginal cost of digital is clear. But abundance has a paradox that no one mentions in the crowd: the more abundant it is that can be replicated, the more limited and valuable that which cannot be copied becomes. Brand, talent, confidence, know-howaccumulated reputation. In a world where everything is replicated, what sets the company apart is unrepeatable. And inimitable is intangible.
How do we place the value of the intangible at the center of organizational decision-making?
I get great news: one A Spanish startup has come to solve this problem. COFI solutionthe Barcelona company, founded in 2020, built on this paradox. His work involves identifying, valuing and organizing a company’s intangible assets – software, data, intellectual property, brand, team, know-how, strategic insights – and turning them into auditable and actionable evidence. Not in theory: in numbers, with a methodology that seeks investor, buyer or regulator control and includes IAS38, EFRAG and IFRS standards.
The extraordinary thing about this field is not just the rigor—more than a few economic formulas, more than a hundred typologies of intangible assets, more than a thousand companies analyzed—but what they did with it: they industrialized. What used to require months of specialized consulting—a form adopted when the opportunity passed—is now ninety percent automated Futurlytics on a platform with integrated artificial intelligence. A process that was slow, opaque and expensive can now be used in very different contexts: inversion wheel, due diligence, procurement, ESG reporting required by European regulation. It’s not just that it’s faster. That is why it is accessible worldwide. I’m not sorry if you want to know the value of your intangibles but don’t know how. Please pay attention to this company. You may have loved it because you have a great ability to make noise and give little nuece, but this is the exact opposite. For her, intangible ROI must be a rhetorical question.
Volvo at the beginning. Marshall asked me to listen. Pigou wanted to meditate to correct what the market does not see. Galbraith advised us that this profession is easy to learn. Y During my years of environmental economics, I learned that it is possible to value the invisible not to reduce it to that number, but to keep it alive in the conversation of where decisions come from.
The market is a good business. You can make visible what matters, equip yourself with a language similar to things that otherwise appeal to intuition. But when you turn into love – when we say that price is the last word about value – you destroy the one who cannot love you.
With immaterial merchants it is the same as with the forests or cathedrals of my researched era: if there are no names, if there are no numbers, if there are no places in a language to understand, it simply does not exist. It’s changed that you have no excuse for continuing by telling it like it’s a fatality.
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