La commercializzazione e valorizzazione dei brevetti: Nessi teorici ed empirici

This research aims at deepening the theoretical and empirical relevance of value of intangible assets, since these latter play an important role in in influencing competitive dynamics. Indeed, intangible assets are relevant and influential variables in determining competitive advantage. For instance, Google and Apple daily fight for reaching a dominant position in terms of intellectual property (IP) portfolio. Moreover, business press such The Economist dedicate special issues on the strategic management of intangible assets and on the importance of licensing and markets for technologies as means to leverage innovation and revenues. Finally, professional investing raters create indexes –e.g. S&P500- that link evaluation of intangible assets to organizational performances. As a matter of fact, the value of intangible assets is such a core topic in current economy, that research could not neglect it. On one side theoretical contributions coming from Italian scholars established evaluation models for intangible assets and patents, on the other side empirical international studies focused on the correlation between the sale of intangibles, the value of assets and the essential characteristics of innovation embedded into them. Given the extensive background, this research focuses on the relevance of strategic value of patents as a driver for the creation of efficient markets for technologies. More in-depth, four chapters inform the present research. In the first chapter, I summarize national and international research streams, which deal with the notion of strategic resource and the associated meaning of value. Therefore, the second chapter deepens the evaluative models that have been established in the literature to empirically measure the value of intangible assets. The third and fourth chapters empirically disentangle the research question. In the third chapter, I use likelihood econometric estimations on a sample of 8000 European patents to establish the impact of strategic value on the willingness to license a patent and on the probability of effectively license this latter. In the fourth chapter, I analyze through a longitudinal case study on a series of intellectual property auctions how transactional mechanism influence the final valuation of patents. In sum, the research contributes in extending our awareness on the relevance on strategic value of intangible assets. Finally, the thesis suggests further researchable topics that could extend the present framework to better understand how the marketability of intangible assets and their strategic value influence the variation of firms’ competitive positioning.