Scholars like Baruch Lev have sought to extend traditional practices around intangible assets and there are also many practitioners in Europe such as Goran Roos who pursue various approaches for determining the financial value of intangible assets. Oliver Schwabe and I will be presenting a paper at Daniel Adriessen's academic intellectual conference in the Netherlands next April, which is largely populated with people pursuing the valuation question.
However, other pioneers in intellectual capital such as Karl-Erik Sveiby and Leif Edvinsson have been less concerned with the question of direction valuation of intangibles and focus more on understanding how intangibles function as strategic assets, not financial assets.
Baruch includes patents in his definition of intangible assets, while Karl-Erik, Leif (and I) would consider patents as tangible assets because they can be assigned a financial value, while other assets, such as business practices and ways of working cannot.
Further I believe the more interesting question is how we convert those assets into more negotiable forms of value. After all the real worth of an asset lies in what it enables you to do. Focusing on the value of a patent is like putting your attention on the wheel instead of the intelligence that created the wheel. The wheel may have a financial value becuase you can trade it for money and other things, but how do you value the human intelligence and creativity capacity that generated the wheel in the first place.
I believe we need to move beyond these traditional ways of only considering the financial aspects of our business ecosystems, but there is no reason to dismiss traditional methods or the reasonable extensions of those that have been proposed by Lev and others pursuing the valuation questions. However, there is a trap in the traditional ways of thinking about assets. The problem is the practice of assigning value to specific components of the business instead of considering the enterprise as an ecosystem - where the parts are interdependent and the whole of a healthy business ecosystem is greater than the sum of its parts.
Value Network Analysis (VNA) helps to avoid that trap. It is just a first step toward understanding economics as the true social science that it is supposed to be. Until we understand value as an emergent property of a complex value creating ecosystem we have not really moved beyond the rationalist perspective. What we also forget is that money has no "real" value in and of itself, it is just a unit of measure and a mechanism to make it more convenient for us to trade goods and services. It is only as valuable (literally!) as we believe it to be. | 
