Valutazione dei beni intangibili e protezione della proprietà intellettuale

In today's context, where extreme rivalry and globalization enabled a less demanding access to data, immaterial resources have obtained increasingly significance inside organizations. They have become strategic enough to result essential for companies to establish themselves. As a result of that, it is said that intangible assets represent half of the aggregate estimation of organizations' financial resources. Therefore, organizations invest a lot of resources in the development of intangibles to obtain a competitive advantage towards the other player of the market. The main objective of the research is to identify which resources can be defined as intangible assets and how they are accepted in the financial statements, in order to determine the evaluation of the company. The first part aims at creating a classification of those resources. Main theories will be taken into consideration in order to offer a complete vision of the panorama where intangibles are developed. The focus will be on giving a methodology to recognize those resources and then a defined path to distinguish different categories under the same big subject. The second part of this thesis consists in a comparative analysis on how these resources are accounted in the financial statements according to international principles both IAS/IFRS and US GAAP, the two most important and accepted accounting principles. Especially IAS/IFRS are becoming more and more important and mandatory so that balance sheets are drafted in the same way and this allows an easier comparison. The third part wants to focus on the legal protection of the intangibles. It is an analysis on Intellectual Property and the main criteria and steps in order to define the main intangibles that can be protected by law and how to obtain this legal protection, to prevent others to exploit a new invention without permission.