Richard Blades

About

Overview

Recently started as a PhD Student at Bayes. Richard's research interests are in intangibles (and how enterprise innovation flows through into equity valuation), and in earnings management. Prior to joining Bayes, Richard had a 30 years career spanning roles in strategy, innovation and management consulting to Senior Director level for companies such as KPMG, Vodafone, O2/Telefonica, and NTT DATA.

Qualifications

• MBA, University of Warwick, United Kingdom
• BA Economics, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom
• Business Valuation, Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, United Kingdom

Employment

• PhD. Student, Bayes Business School, Sep 2023 – present

Expertise

Primary topics

• Accounting
• Capital Markets
• Financial Accounting
• Innovation & Creativity

Research

Title of thesis: Connecting innovation and equity valuation by reclassifying intangibles

Sep 2023 – Mar 2028

Summary of research

An innovation-based narrative often forms the basis of firms’ investment theses. Yet, because the end-to-end relationship between innovation, firm performance, and equity valuation is opaque, equity analysts and investors, who need to assess these theses critically, lack the proper means to deconstruct this relationship. It is interesting to consider whether intangibles, which play a pivotal and multi-faceted role in firms’ innovation processes, maybe the key to unlocking this relationship.
A new method for re-estimating investment in intangibles by reclassifying a portion of SG&A expenses as investments (Iqbal et al., 2021) presents a partial analytical pathway between innovation and company value. Developing such an approach into an analytical framework using data from company financial reports would create a powerful strategic analysis tool of significant benefit to investors, equity analysts, and firms. However, simply reclassifying expenditures on intangibles only completes part of the innovation-valuation ‘puzzle’ because the multiples used in ratio-based valuation techniques (e.g., P/E, EV/EBITDA) are calibrated on ‘un-reclassified’ financials, and cashflow is unaffected This project aims to bridge this ‘missing link’.

1^st supervisor

• Professor Pawel Bilinski, Professor of Accounting