Intellectual property is hard to steal

It's hard to transfer intellectual property. When I was managing software projects, it would take months to fully transfer a project from one person to another. This was with full access to and encouragement from the original developer. This was a transfer between peers, both part of the same environment with all its institutional memory. If it's this hard to transfer a project to a colleague, how hard must it be for a competitor to make sense of stolen files?

I'm most familiar with intellectual property in the form of software, but I imagine the same applies to many other forms of intellectual property. Some forms of data are easy to understand, such as a list of passwords. But others, such as source code, require a large amount of context beyond the data. One reason acquisitions fail so often is that the physical assets of a company are not enough. The most valuable assets a company has are often intangible.

Of course companies should protect their intellectual property, but a breach is not necessarily a disaster. On the other hand, the loss of institutional memory may be a disaster.