Ten Trillion Dollars Just Went Invisible: Is Any of It Yours?

WIPO and Luiss Business School have put a hard number on the world’s move from factories to ideas. Here is what it means for anyone doing business in Malaysia, and what it quietly costs the ones who never protected what they built.

The money has moved

Every so often a report lands that simply confirms what the deal flow has been telling us for years. The World Intangible Investment Highlights 2026, the third edition of a joint study by WIPO and Luiss Business School, is one of them. Drawing on the Global INTAN-Invest Database across 29 economies that account for 57% of world GDP, it puts hard numbers on a shift anyone advising businesses in this region has watched unfold: value has stopped living in machines and started living in brands, code, data, research, and the know-how that holds a company together.

The scale is the story. Intangible investment, spanning R&D, software and databases, brands, design and organisational capital, passed USD 10 trillion in 2025 across the economies studied, growing 3.5% a year since 2008. That is more than three-and-a-half times the pace of spending on physical assets. It has proven remarkably durable, too. Even through the interest rate shocks of 2022 and 2023, intangible investment grew 5.5% a year between 2020 and 2025, against 3.2% for tangibles. The USA, Japan and Germany lead in sheer size. However, on intensity, Sweden, the USA and France lead the way. And closer to home, India, Japan and the Philippines posted the fastest growth of any of the report’s 15 largest economies.

Malaysia isn’t in this dataset. That should give you pause.

Malaysia does not appear among the 29 economies WIPO and Luiss currently track, and we are not on the shortlist for what comes next either, a list that already runs to Austria, China, Egypt, Ireland, Morocco, Korea, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Türkiye.

The gap does not mean the shift skipped Malaysia. It means the shift is happening here largely in the dark. Businesses are building brand equity, proprietary software, research pipelines and institutional know-how every day. Nobody is counting it, and in our experience, far too few businesses have got round to protecting it.

The comparisons the report does capture are telling. India’s intangible investment grew 7.9% in 2022 to 2023, the fastest of any of its 15 largest economies. The Philippines grew 4.6% over 2021 to 2022, with software and databases climbing an eye-watering 18.3% a year over the past decade and R&D rising more than sixfold. Both economies still pour more into physical infrastructure than into intangibles, which is roughly where Malaysia sits today. But the direction is unmistakable: even the region’s busiest infrastructure-builders are shifting their weight toward brands, code and know-how, and doing it faster than most mature economies manage.

For a manufacturer building an export brand, a start-up building a platform, or a family business finally writing down forty years of institutional knowledge, the question this report raises is not whether intangible assets matter — it is whether the paperwork behind them has kept up with how much of the business they now represent.

Brands are a trillion-dollar bet with no insurance policy

This year’s special theme is brands, and it lands close to home for any Malaysian business with regional or global ambitions. Brand investment across the sample economies hit USD 1.4 trillion in 2025, growing 4.2% a year since 2015. The report traces a familiar route for businesses in developing economies: beginning as a contract manufacturer, moving into proprietary design, and eventually selling under your own name. It is the same path Korean firms walked decades ago, and plenty of Malaysian companies are on it right now.

Here is the catch: under current accounting rules, brand investment still counts as a cost, not an asset. The UN Statistical Commission had the chance to change that in its 2025 review of national accounts and chose not to. So, brand value gets built through years of patient spending, then shows up nowhere on the balance sheet, unless a business has actually registered it, watched for infringement, and structured it to support licensing or franchising down the line.

An unregistered or unmonitored trademark portfolio is not a paperwork gap. It is brand equity nobody is guarding, and increasingly, an open door for counterfeiters, copycats and, in the report’s own words, AI-generated deepfakes posing as you.

Your know-how only belongs to you if you can prove it

The report calls organisational capital and R&D the twin pillars of intangible investment. Together they make up more than half the total once you count everything that officially goes unmeasured. Both raise the same question we hear from clients week after week: who actually owns this, and can you prove it in writing?

Organisational know-how, the operating models, supply chain playbooks and institutional expertise that make a business run, usually lives in the heads and contracts of employees, contractors, and eventually, the people who leave. It is not a registrable right. It survives on well-drafted employment contracts, confidentiality clauses, IP assignment provisions, and restrictive covenants built to actually hold up when tested. AI raises the stakes further. As businesses rebuild their workflows around AI tools, the real asset becomes the redesigned operating model itself. Without a contract spelling out who owns the AI-assisted outputs, the training data and the process documentation, that value can walk out the door with the next resignation letter or terminated vendor.

For R&D-active businesses, and there are more of them across Malaysian manufacturing, life sciences, agritech and tech than most people assume, the equivalent question is whether patentable inventions, trade secrets and data assets sit with the right entity, and whether they were protected before anyone disclosed, licensed or handed them to a joint venture partner.

What this means for you

None of this is theoretical. Intangible assets now drive valuations in M&A due diligence, get pledged as leverage in financing conversations, and are usually the first thing fought over when a joint venture collapses, a senior employee jumps to a competitor, or counterfeit stock surfaces in the market. A business that has never audited its intangible assets is carrying an unpriced, unprotected line item that nobody has thought to put on the books.

The Question: So here is the question worth asking before someone else asks it for you:

If a competitor, an investor or a court had to work out tomorrow what your intangible assets are and who actually owns them, would the paper trail hold up?

If the honest answer is ‘not sure’, that is exactly the conversation worth having now, rather than in the middle of a dispute, a deal or a departure.

This article was authored by Suaran Singh Sidhu (Partner) and Ashwinathan Selvanathan (Associate).

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Key contacts

Please contact our team if you have any questions.

Dato’ Brian Law | Co-Head, Intellectual Property

Suaran Singh Sidhu | Co-Head, Intellectual Property