Using AHP in patent valuation

As the knowledge economy rapidly increases, intangible assets are more valuable to businesses and valuing them attracts much research from the field of technology management. Intangible assets include intellectual capital and intellectual property. Intellectual property is often protected by patents. Since the enterprise is willing to pay the patent costs to guarantee a sustainable competence, it would be useful to be able to determine when it is worthwhile. We propose an objective scoring system for intellectual property patents from the licensor side in this study using the AHP. We used it to value the patents for new products being developed by an actual enterprise. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.