Clearly, all the entertainment value of the Den will be depreciated if all Duncan, Theo et al have to do is run a software programme on each business idea and see if the numbers stack up.

I'm not sure they have anything to worry about for a while yet though. I tried YouNoodle's Start-up Predictor. It failed to launch. Three times. On the fourth attempt my laptop froze, then crashed. Maybe it's trying to tell me something.

Anyway, having eventually navigated my way through the website I found out how it works. It's not complicated, but what I found most intriguing is the questions it asks.

For example, it asks for the age of the person founding the business, the age of the team members, and then asks for information about the relationships between all these people. It also asks about the skills of the individuals involved, their experience, and any outside connections to people who may be able to help make the start-up successful.

At the end, you get a score and a valuation. It's really quite quirky and clever. And it's free. But basically, what the entrepreneurs at YouNoodle have discovered from research into thousands of existing start-ups that have either gone on to bigger and better things or failed at the first hurdle, is that one of the critical factors determining whether a start-up will succeed is not the actual business concept, the idea, but the people who will make it happen. And that's not new, nor is it unique.

Obviously, the challenge is in putting a value on the people involved, something incredibly tricky, and usually best managed through intuition, gut feel. But it got me thinking about the intellectual capital of an organisation; it's something we're not traditionally very good at recognising, managing, leveraging or valuing.

Research by learndirect Business shows there is a vast untapped potential among employees throughout the country. The recent Hidden Skills Survey revealed that 60% of employees polled felt they had more potential than their jobs demanded; that's roughly 13.4 million people whose skills haven't been recognised or developed. It equates to literally hundreds of thousands of businesses missing out.

More than half (57%) of employees use PCs and laptops at home and are competent at building websites or setting up blogs and 28% consider their writing skills, honed doing crosswords and writing articles for their local paper, for example, to be good but not used to their full potential. The same apparently can be said about numeracy and creativity skills, and in particular, 23% of people thought they had developed sales, marketing and e-commerce skills that could be harnessed in the workplace from their home-based efforts in online buying and selling.

So while businesses complain about skills shortages and recruitment costs, there's a lot to be said for looking a bit closer to home and developing the wealth of talent already hidden within their organisations.

We need to look deeper, ask more questions, and appreciate that assets don't just lie in bricks and mortar, in stock and cash in hand, in share value and return on investment. It's the human factor, an area we all recognise as key but consistently fail to leverage for the benefit of our business.

Try this little exercise: grab a pencil and a bit of paper and try to work out the value of your company's intellectual capital, that is, what it would cost to rebuild your company if all your staff had sudden attacks of amnesia, a killer virus wiped out your network and thieves stole all your backed-up data. It's a frightening thought.

Take it literally, and try to work out what it would cost to educate all your employees from primary through secondary school and university. Add in the cost – if you can – of all the experiences they have amassed over the years of their lives, plus all the training they have received with previous employers and with you.

Consider the cost of re-inputting all the data wiped from your computer network, and retraining your staff so they could remember all the important little details about your clients.

Then add in the marketing costs, the time it took to build a reputation, your brand. The sales costs, and the time and money spent building your client base.

The sums go on and on. The total will undoubtedly run into hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pounds. How do you reflect that intangible value of your business? Could you build it into your balance sheet?

The challenge lies in creating stimulating, not stifling, environments in which people feel valued and are given the freedom to expand intellectually, and where their hidden skills are no longer cowering under a bushel, but recognised as valuable to your business – for their benefit, for the benefit of your brand, and ultimately, your business.

The intellectual assets of most companies walk out the door at 5pm every evening. If and when YouNoodle devises a clever software programme to secure that knowledge, then I'll be really interested.