Are IP Values Collapsing With The Recession?
January 27th, 2009 Greg Daines
There’s a terrific post and debate over at the IAM Blog about the apparent collapse in the intangible values of companies. This arose out of both a very stimulating blog post by Pat Sullivan on the fallacy of the common intangible value concept derived from corporate securities pricing, and also an article in this month’s IAM by Nir Kossovsky about what that does or does not mean about the collapse of securities recently. As company valuations collapse in the current recession, does that say anything about the real value of IP? It’s a great question, and one that I think is ready for a serious answer. The blog post is great but the comments (by many leading thinkers in this field) are even better.
I personally think this forces all of us to think in a much more realistic and sophisticated way about what IP value is and how it is defined, created, realized, and transferred. That has to be a good thing.
I have a lot of perspectives on this myself that I will try to articulate in future posts. In particular, I have some interesting and unique data that seems to indicate that market valuations of IP are strongly cyclical - that is, they do go down in recessions. But that is for a future post. For now, I am appreciating the frank and probing conversation started by Sullivan and Kossovsky and carried on by many others. Bravo!
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March 6th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
This is very interesting; most would assume a tendency for patent growth to follow the economic curve and not to precede it. What about the ip litigation cases and how they change as patents become more profitable during a recession? I think there is a lot of useful information along those lines as well.