A system and methods for managing intellectual property using a blockchain are provided which may include one or more elements which forms a comprehensive foundation for an eco-system for innovation and intellectual property management. The elements may include: an intellectual property distributed ledger, an intellectual property digital policy server, non-binary trust models, automatic ontology induction, modifications to the blockchain “mining” and “proof of work” system, appstore for related applications, partial transparency transactionalized search engine, persistent and encapsulated software trust objects, licensing royalty smart contract with auditable payment tracking, micro-equity incentives, automated fraud detection intellectual property management dashboards, innovation workflow broker, innovation optimization tools, disruption mapping, and intelligent just-in-time learning. The system combines and integrates these functions to enable personal, intra-enterprise, inter-enterprise and extra-enterprise recordation, collaboration, searchability and its benefits, licensing and tracking of information regarding intellectual property over a networked distributed computing system.