There’s a dearth of market data for valuing intangible assets such as company workforce, trade name, emerging technologies, research and development, etc. “You can’t go to the Wall Street Journal and look up today’s pricing of patents,” says Mark Zyla (Willamette Management Associates), a panelist on yet another BVR “hot topic” telephone conference.

But the environment is changing, albeit slowly. For example, Zyla points to “Ocean Tomo,” an investment banking group which has experimented with auctioning patents, categorized by specific industries; this summer, they auctioned certain technology—which offers some data on market transactions of intangibles. For a complete transcript or CD of BVR’s “Valuing Intangible Assets for Financial Reporting,” click here.