The Economic Valuation of Patents

The EVPAT (Economic Valuation of Patents) project, based at the Department of Management (Dipartimento di Scienze Aziendali) of the University of Bologna (http://www.sa.unibo.it) has the overall goal to review, improve and validate analytic models for the economic valuation of patents. It is funded by the European Investment Bank (www.eib.org) within the EIBURS – University Research Sponsorship Programme. The project is articulated in two main activities which are deeply interrelated: research activities and diffusion activities. Research activities The research activities investigate the issue of patent valuation at different levels of analysis and in different stages of firm life cycle. - Economic valuation of patents and patent portfolios. This activity is aimed to review, improve and validate methods for patent valuation based on real options theory. - Patent portfolios and venture capital investments. The objective of this research activity is to analyze whether the characteristics of a VC firm (such as industry experience and specialization) affect its ability to effectively assess the patent portfolio of a target company. - Patents and IPO: This activity has the objective to analyze whether more R&D intensive firms have, ceteris paribus, a lower probability to go public and whether the provision of information contained in patents can lower eventual IPO barriers. - Stock market valuation of patent portfolios: The objective of this activity is to analyze how stock markets in Europe evaluate the patent portfolios of publicly traded firms. The four lines of research will exploit an original database including information on all patents granted at the European Patent Office, created by the Department of Management of the University of Bologna within the EVPAT project. Training and diffusion activities The training and diffusion activities are aimed to disclose the research results and raise awareness on the importance of the protection, exploitation and valuation of patents