The Patent Portfolios Value Evaluation Based on the TOPSIS-Entropy Method

Abstract

How to evaluate the value of patent portfolios in a competitive market has attracted increasing attention. At present, most existing methods have to determine the weightings of multiple indicators based on expert judgements in the process of patent value evaluation. In this paper, we propose a new approach to value firms' patent portfolios by combining Entropy and Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), which can be called the TOPSIS-Entropy method. The weights of multiple indicators can be determined by using Entropy, while the ranking of patent portfolios value is calculated by TOPSIS. A case of applying the TOPSIS-Entropy method is given in the paper. The TOPSIS-Entropy method is proved reasonable and suitable for patent portfolios value evaluation.