The Hills Are Alive With The Sound Of Risk/Reward Management

Saturday, 31 August 2002
By Now&ZYen

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Well, Rodgers and Hammerstein can sleep soundly on their royalties if this is the best Z/Yen can do. We sent Michael Mainelli to the European Alpbach Forum in the Tyrolean alps to hob-nob with his fellow wizards (of Oz reference, geddit?). The Alpbach is a half-century old get-together in Austria originally supported by notables such as Schrödinger and Köstler. Academics, artists, politicians and business-people exchange ideas for fresh air, or something like that. Michael spoke on some of our advanced techniques for valuing intellectual assets, "Information Security: The Science and Technology of Recognizing and Protecting Valuable Intellectual Assets", including risk/reward options and critical sets. His slides are here. He claimed the high point was having a physics Nobel Prize winner in his working group, and the low point knowing he was about to present some equations. Knowing how many normally attend a working group when there’s a Wirtschaft nearby, we can just hum, “High on a hill was a lonely…”