1. What intangible assets can be valued?

A pragmatic approach is to identify all rights and all knowledge or information for which a third party is willing to pay a certain price, either to gain access to it or to exploit it, i.e. which have a commercial value. These include :

• patents for inventions (including plant breeders' rights), or patentable inventions kept secret ;

• software, databases ;

• ornamental creations protected by design or copyright;

• trade secrets, know-how (industrial or commercial) which must be secret (i.e. not easily accessible), substantial (i.e. providing a competitive advantage such as reducing manufacturing costs), identified (e.g. test reports, plans, models, prototypes, training manuals, procedures, specifications, clinical trials, biological materials,...