Valuation of University-Originated Technologies: A Predictive Analytics Approach

Experts have difficulty assessing the economic value of university-originated technologies due to the high level of uncertainty associated with the commercialization of early stage and basic technologies. This article proposes a random forest approach to the valuation of university-originated technologies that integrates monetary value and patent value models for technology valuation. First, a technological characteristics-value matrix was constructed after defining a total of 23 indicators from the U.S. Patent and Trademark and Scopus databases and extracting the value of university-originated technologies from technology transaction databases. Second, a random forest model, an ensemble machine learning model based on a multitude of decision trees, was employed to assess the economic value of university-originated technologies. Finally, the performance of our approach was assessed using quantitative metrics. A case study of the technologies registered in the Office of Technology Licensing of Stanford University confirms, with statistically significant outcomes, that our method is valuable as a complementary tool for the valuation of university-originated technologies.