intellectual capital

Intellectual capital is knowledge that can be exploited for some money-making or other useful purpose. The term combines the idea of the intellect or brain-power with the economic concept of capital, the saving of entitled benefits so that they can be invested in producing more goods and services.

Intellectual capital includes the following: 

• the skills and knowledge that a company has developed about how to make its goods or services;
• individual employees or groups of employees whose knowledge is deemed critical to a company's continued success;
• an aggregation of documents about processes, customers, research results, and other information that might have value for a competitor but is not common knowledge.