eBusiness

The legal monopoly granted by IP laws are credited with significant contributions toward economic growth. Economists estimate that two-thirds of the value of large businesses in the U.S. can be traced to intangible assets. Likewise, industries which rely on IP protections are estimated to produce 72 percent more value per added employee than non-IP industries.[3] Additionally, a joint research project of the WIPO and the United Nations University measuring the impact of IP systems on six Asian countries found “a positive correlation between the strengthening of the IP system and subsequent economic growth.” [4] However, correlation does not necessarily imply causation.

Electronic Business, commonly referred to as “eBusiness” or “e-Business”, may be defined as the utilization of information and communication technologies (ICT) in support of all the activities of business. Commerce constitutes the exchange of products and services between businesses, groups and individuals and hence can be seen as one of the essential activities of any business. Hence, electronic commerce or eCommerce focuses on the use of ICT to enable the external activities and relationships of the business with individuals, groups and other businesses. Louis Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM, in his book, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? attributes the term “e-Business” to IBM’s marketing and Internet teams in 1996.

Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily since the spread of the Internet. A wide variety of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at some point in the transaction’s lifecycle, although it can encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail as well.

Intellectual capital is a term with various definitions in different theories of management and economics. Accordingly, its only truly neutral definition is as a debate over economic “intangibles”. Ambiguous combinations of human capital, instructional capital and individual capital employed in productive enterprise are usually what is meant by the term, when it is used to actually refer to a capital asset whose yield is intellectual property rights.

Such use is rare, however, and the term rarely or never appears in accounting proper - it refers to a debate, and to the assumed capital base that creates intellectual property, rather than an auditable style of capital.

Perhaps due to their industry focus, the term “intellectual capital” is employed mostly by theorists in information technology, innovation research, technology transfer and other fields concerned primarily with technology, standards, and venture capital. It was particularly prevalent in 1995-2000 as theories proliferated to explain the “dotcom boom” and high valuations.