Over the last years, due to intensive competition in the knowledge economy, legal aspects surrounding intellectual property (IP) rights - including litigation and settlement - have continuously gained in importance. Correspondingly, professional IP management has become an indispensable element of successful value-based management (VBM) in research-intensive firms.

With this text, the author proposes an integrated approach to patent risk and capital budgeting in pharmaceutical research and development (R and D), developing an option-based view (OBV) of imperfect patent protection,...