Betriebswirtschaftliche Patentportfoliobewertung - eine informationswissenschaftliche Perspektive

Abstract

Today most of a firm's value is composed of its intangible assets. Patents as one type of intangible assets play a crucial role for technology oriented firms since they help preventing imitation of the firms' products. Therefore, valuing patents from a management science perspective plays an important role. Up to now the value of individual patents or patent portfolios has been estimated assuming that patents possess an individual and separable value, which would ultimately imply that the value of a patent portfolio consists of the sum of the individual patents' values. This however, contradicts different patent management strategies that rely on interdependencies between individual patents, for instance fencing important patents by additional property rights, or surrounding patents from competitors in order to limit their freedom to operate. Therefore, interdependencies between individual patents should have an impact on patent and patent portfolio values.In this contribution a dataset from biotechnology and pharmaceutical firms is used. It is investigated by means of established indicators from information science if interdependencies between patents, controlling for several other indicators, in fact have an impact on portfolio value. In advance, several studies were conducted that aimed to:a)demonstrate the status quo of patent analysis,b)investigate the usefulness of several patentometric value indicators empirically,c)investigate several text-mining approaches that can be employed to measure similarities and thus, interdependencies, between documents, andd)determine time-intervals between patent applications and finally, their impact on portfolio value.It could be shown that patent clusters within a firm that may represent patent fencing strategies - ultimately representing interdependencies - that have a significant and positive effect on portfolio value. This could mean that current patent portfolio valuation methodologies should be reconsidered in the future.