At a recently held Canadian International Council conference, intellectual property was high on the list of talking points as a flurry of recent patent litigation issues has drawn attention to the importance of intellectual assets.

The task of IP valuation continues to confound companies from all industries and within all revenue levels. According to the Financial Post, the billions of dollars spent on patent acquisitions by technology giants such as Google and Apple may be primarily defensive measures rather than accurate perceptions of a patent's financial worth.

"All of a sudden we have some recognition that all this stuff is out there, but we don't even know exactly what we're talking about or what it is," former Microsoft IP policy and strategy executive Marshall Phelps told the news source. "So you've got everybody scurrying for hegemony in this world while half of them don't know what it is they're scurrying after."

As worldwide patent applications have soared in the past decade, patent offices inundated with filings have had little time to sort out poor-quality patents from the stacks of potential innovations, according to the Globe and Mail. As a result, regulatory inconsistencies may be making the already difficult practice of IP valuation an even more speculative endeavor.