Exploring a Sense of Intellectual Property Valuation for Indian SMEs

Introduction

There are several compelling reasons in the literature to protect the intellectual property¹ (IP). It encourages innovation (Kremer, 1988; Helpman, 1993; Jeffe & Josh, 2004; Chen & Thitima, 2005; Crosby, 2007) and rewards entrepreneurs (Gans, 2003; Boone, 2001; Teece, 1987), drives economic growth (Schmookler, 1966; Falvey et al., 2004; Thompson and Rushing, 1999; Gould and William, 1996) and competitiveness (Landerman and William, 2003; Lai, 1998 and Chaudhuri et al., 2006), creates and supports competitive jobs (Vandenbussche et al., 2007; Burke and Fraser, 2007; Burke et al., 2002), protects consumers and families (Frank & Salkever, 1997; Hausman & Leonar, 2002; Giancarlo & Harvey, 1997), and helps generate breakthrough solutions to global challenges (Bruno,2009; GIPC, 2011; Norm et al., 2011). Most importantly, the shift towards knowledge and technology-based industries has placed increasing importance on intellectual assets as the source of competitive advantage for firms, thus increasing the need to have such assets protected (WIPO, 2004). All businesses today- big and small, public and private, high and low technology enabled- need to create and extract value from their intellectual capital. However, the capabilities to generate and develop, protect, level of usage and exploitation of IP varies significantly across the organization, depending on their sector, size, focus, resources and the business environment in which they operate. Larger sized firms give tremendous value to their intellectual property (Christine & Mark, 2007; Gould & Gruben, 1996; Sumanjeet, 2012). Today, between 60-80 per cent of the market value of the companies on S&P is attributed to IP (Roberts, 2012). In 2007, 90 per cent of the Global 2000 enterprise value was attributable to ‘intellectual assets’ (up from 20 per cent in 1978). In 2011, the brand value of the Coke Company’s intangibles (excluding goodwill) was estimated at around US$ 71,861 million, followed by IBM at US$ 69,905 million, Microsoft at US$ 59,087 million and Google at US$ 55,317 million (Table 1).