Valuation of Patents-Comparative Analysis

Introduction: There has been a common notion worldwide that more investment into research and development leads to more knowledge production as well as more technological advancement. Thus in last one century there were various scholars like Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi, Max Weber, Joseph Shumpeter, Christopher Freeman etc who tried to collect data at different level to understand the relationship of investment with economical advancement of the society through knowledge production and technological capability enhancement. In this process of studying the economical change, need to indentify common indicator that can connect the dots with Research & Development, Investment, Production as well as Technological advancement was felt . As a result of which various scholars started considering Intellectual Property Rights in form of Patents as an indicator to study economical advancement, since the patent data was comparatively easily available and initial correlation between investment and patent could be established. But there were two schools of thoughts one who argued that if patents help technological advancement of the society then at what rate and does this advancement helps in knowledge production. On the other hand other school of thought argued that patents limits technological advancement of the society by creating artificial scarcity through introducing market restriction for others. Objective & Methodology: Scholars like Jacob Schmookle , Grilliches & Pakes, F.M.Scherer, Edwin Masfield as well as Freeman and Pavitt carried out pioneer work in field of quantitative analysis of patents to understand its impact over knowledge production, technological advancement and finally to the economy at large. Though they all tried to work with different methodology which has been discussed in the paper, they were all concerned about the fact that how rate of technological advancement in a society can be quantified and most importantly to understand that does patents really help technological advancement or rather simply supports monopoly. Conclusion: After doing comparative analysis of their work one thing which is very clear that all the early research pointed to the fact that ‘instead of considering reforms to strengthen patents, we should move in opposite direction to strengthen technological advancement.’