What's My Knowledge Worth?

We started this project with a simple question: what's my knowledge worth? Not what does it cost — but what is it worth? And then, how do I get the most value from it — as a return, not just vague potential? My gut tells me some knowledge trades are bargains and others lemons — but how do I explain that feeling? And how do I bring that explanation to work so my people are more productive, and the knowledge markets the firm trades in become more profitable?

In short: how can I commercialise knowledge, and not just keep costing it?

Costing knowledge is both easy and insufficient. Proxies are everywhere and they conflate knowledge-as-an-asset with other asset classes like labour or capital: the timesheet or salary line, in project fees or subscription costs. I want to know what knowledge returns — because costing knowledge is only half of the equation and when the value side is left invisible, knowledge work is reduced to a series of fire sales on an equally invisible market.

Today, we make decisions about knowledge assets knowing less than half the picture. Everything a firm knows has a cost; nothing it knows has a price.

Stepping back, this matters beyond the accounts. Without a price, a process can only be judged by what it consumed — not by what it produced. I have put knowledge workers into roles, rebuilt knowledge businesses and directed global operations — but I always mimicked 'best practice' and never followed first principles. How do I know if my team got the most value from their new hire, independent of the hours they worked? Could I change something upstream that doubled their value? Could a downstream investment even reduce the value of the whole process? What our firms cost is the hour, but the value the hour delivered is never written down. If I baked cakes, I could evaluate the kneader and the oven by what each did to the dough; I would have a way to measure my investment in terms of the resource produced — not a conflated proxy. Imagine knowing what ingredients were missing in your knowledge production process — and tracking impact directly. Imagine knowing knowledge like a baker knows dough, or a carpenter knows wood.

But it gets bigger still — because this isn't just operational improvement. This approach would rewrite the value of the firm in its markets. Every deal, contract, purchase or partnership would become an informed knowledge trade — optimised for captured return, not clearance. From engaging consultants to sending emails it could optimise the trade: 'what is the value of the knowledge we shared, vs. the value we captured from what was returned?' The more the firm reinvests the returns in its own knowledge assets, the more it could share with services like AI. It could test knowledge shared with consultants or code repositories at source — and avoid defending it later in the boardroom.

Which is why we're running this project in the open. If these questions have answers, then our competition isn't with each other — it is with the value we've all left on the table: the value left unexchanged, untracked, uncaptured when each day is closed. It's the knowledge left inside the LLM never to compound; the partnership we underfunded because we both lacked the logic to see the upside; it's the knowledge economy that's stolen because we all chased the short-run gains.

We started working on The Invisible Market in June 2026 because we saw a knowledge-of-knowledge problem. Knowledge was everywhere: sold at cost, exchanged like a product and left to languish. For a decade we've helped firms who couldn't see the production process they ran, who were making trades on markets — oblivious to the terms, and watched ecosystems that ripened without governance. And we wanted to make that knowledge visible.

The Invisible Market.