Building and accumulating intangible assets: a sustainable competitive advantage

DNHN - In an intellectually vibrant afternoon of the business community, a seemingly old question was raised again in a way that made the entire audience rethink from the beginning.

It asked what truly creates the value of a business in an era where what can be seen is increasingly easy to replicate, while what cannot be seen quietly determines the entire game.

The seminar “building and accumulating intangible assets: a sustainable competitive advantage”, combined with the launch of the book The Value of the Invisible by Dr. Nguyen Trung Kien, attracted a large number of entrepreneurs, investors, and experts.

The event brought together many influential figures in science, technology, and investment from policymakers to those directly operating businesses but what stood out was how the program was designed as a genuine dialogue forum, where difficult questions were not avoided, and “immeasurable” issues were discussed openly and candidly.

Intangible asset strategy – Vietnamese enterprises are overlooking their own gold mine

Dr. Nguyen Trung Kien, Head of the Institute for Technology Strategy and Innovation, clarified a reality that is becoming increasingly evident yet not fully recognized in management practices in Vietnam: the traditional approach, mainly based on financial indicators and tangible assets, is gradually losing its ability to accurately reflect business value in an environment where most value is created from hard-to-measure factors such as brand, market trust, leadership capability, organizational culture, and technological platforms.

These factors do not appear directly on financial statements, yet they determine a company’s ability to sustain growth and expand in the long term. This has been confirmed by many international studies, including analysis by Ocean Tomo, which shows that the proportion of intangible assets in publicly listed companies in the United States has surpassed a critical threshold, specifically, “the share of intangible assets in the knowledge economy has reached 92%, compared to only about 17% in the industrial era.”

“Tangible assets help a business survive, but intangible assets determine how far it can go” – this statement by Dr. Nguyen Trung Kien reflects a structural shift in the economy, where value no longer lies in what can be possessed, but in what can be created, sustained, and amplified over time.

In addition, leading financial and technology experts in Vietnam delved deeper into questions that the business community is facing but has yet to fully answer from whether companies are “managing what can be measured but failing because of what cannot be measured,” to what investors are actually betting on when deciding to invest in a highly volatile environment, and how global managers have been effectively managing intangible assets.

From an investment perspective, Dr. Ana Le My Nga stated that business valuation is increasingly dependent on non-financial factors, not as a temporary trend, but as an inevitable consequence of how value is created in the digital economy, where team quality, the depth of relationship ecosystems, innovation capacity, and the ability to transform knowledge into practical products become far more critical variables than the scale of tangible assets recorded on the books.

Meanwhile, Dr. Chu Duc Hoang approached the issue from a systems perspective, emphasizing that core technology, data, and intellectual property are not only tools for generating profit but also foundations for expanding into new market spaces. However, to achieve this, businesses need a structured strategy to identify, protect, and leverage intangible assets, rather than treating them as auxiliary elements.

One of the biggest bottlenecks highlighted throughout the discussion was that many Vietnamese enterprises possess valuable intangible resources from customer data accumulated over years, established brand recognition, to organizational knowledge formed through operations but these assets exist in fragmented forms, lack systematization, are not protected by appropriate legal mechanisms, and, more importantly, are not deliberately integrated into business strategies. This leads to a situation where they are “difficult to accurately value and at risk of being lost or exploited by competitors.”

The consequence is not only that businesses are undervalued compared to their true worth, but also that they may lose the very core competitive advantages they have quietly accumulated over many years without even realizing it. This is truly the gold mine of enterprises.

The Book “The Value of the Invisible” – A strategic map for the Elite

The book launch was organized under the concept “from the intangible to the tangible,” not only symbolic but also reflective of a journey every business must undergo to survive and grow in the long term, the transformation of abstract values into knowledge that can be applied, protected, and leveraged. The book aims to suggest a more practical approach, in which businesses need to build their own “intangible asset map.” It is considered a “strategic map for the Elite,” distilled from over 15 years of experience working with Vietnamese and international leaders by Dr. Nguyen Trung Kien.

Beyond strategic analysis, the event also created a networking space for entrepreneurs, investors, and experts, where discussions extended beyond the story of a book to broader issues related to sustainable development in the digital era. In a constantly fluctuating market context, the overarching message emphasized by speakers was that businesses should not only focus on scaling or revenue growth, but more importantly, on building and accumulating foundational values that are difficult to replicate, intangible assets as a layer of “value infrastructure” that helps protect businesses against volatility and enables long-term growth.

Closing the event, Dr. Nguyen Trung Kien delivered a profound message: “The biggest question is no longer what a business owns, but how well you understand and leverage your intangible assets.”

By. Dr Nguyễn Thúy Lan

Vietnamese version: Xây dựng và tích lũy tài sản vô hình: Lợi thế cạnh tranh bền vững