Now that we have explored the ins and outs of intellectual property in previous blogs, the question becomes how do you evaluate its application and effectiveness? At the end of the day, this simply means asking whether your organization is achieving a measurable return on its investment.

Of course, this is not  a simple question to answer—or result to calculate. True, we have come a long way from simply administering smile sheets at the end of training. But evaluating the impact of learning solutions is still a major challenge for most organizations.  

One of the obstacles hindering evaluation efforts is our ability to provide true control groups that don’t receive training. Consequently, it is nearly impossible to rate and compare performance levels.  Although there are experimental methods that address this issue, they are relatively complex. More importantly, they require a portion of employees to  forego training that they likely need.  

A second challenge hampering efforts to evaluate the impact of intellectual property is that our rapidly evolving business environment makes it difficult to pinpoint metrics. In other words, evaluation is based on a constantly moving target. What might signify an important measure at one point in time may not be vital a few months down the road. What’s more, typically these measures are, at best, leading indicators of results—not specific results.

A third complication is that organizations need to evaluate talent development solutions that are focused on improving “soft” skills, which are difficult to define–even if their behavioral demonstrations are obvious. It is simply too hard to assess the conditions employees must demonstrate these behaviors and how they align with a tangible, measurable business outcome.

Bottom line: Despite Kirkpatrick’s four levels of evaluation and Phillips’ ROI evaluation approach, it is still difficult to conduct actual field research that can control all the variables and links talent development efforts to real business outcomes. That isn’t to say, though, that we should stop trying to measure the effectiveness of our intellectual property. Instead, talent professionals need to keep pushing evaluation endeavors forward.

To that end, the first question we need to address is: What means have you put in place to evaluate the effectiveness of your intellectual property? Here are five methods for evaluating impact that can be strategically aligned with your business outcomes:

• competitive analysis

• stakeholder assessment

• customer feedback

• market research and analysis

• results/outcomes evaluation.

In addition, when using any one of these methodologies, be sure to answer these questions:

• Assessment:  What do we/they have?

• Prioritization: What do we/they need?

• Development: How do we/they build it?

• Implementation: How do we/they make it work?

• Evaluation: What value are we/they creating?

Finally, keep in mind that these approaches and questions apply whether you are evaluating your own internally created intellectual capital or external content and partners.