Designing a Patent-Incentive Program? 221
SoulMaster writes "The company I work for (we are a one-year-old start-up) has recently started filing patents to protect some of its intellectual property. At the onset of the patent process, one of the executives drafted a very basic Patent Incentive Program (PIP) which is now under full review to ensure that it is both accurate and fair. The basics of our original PIP are that inventors receive (or co-inventors share): $500 for each provisional filing, $1500 for an actual patent filing (with full claim-sets defined), and $5000 for any patent that is granted by the USPTO. While the current program seems fair to our staff, we have been unable to find anything to compare it to. Moreover, the revamp of the program is likely to grant an equity stake in the company (via an Options grant) rather than cash payouts. I've scoured Google for information, but because internally documented PIPs aren't generally public knowledge, the results are limited. Thus, I have decided to ask Slashdot users: How does the company you work for handle Patent incentives? Do they have them at all? Are they cash or equity based?"
Stanford's patent policy. (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the patent policy of Stanford University [stanford.edu]. This has worked out very well for Stanford.
Re:What price your integrity? (Score:5, Informative)
If you invent something on company time and/or using company resources, they likely own it anyway. You can either participate or just give them the idea for free, because if you try and go behind their backs and patent it on your own, you're going to be in a legal mess.
Sure, you can just invent things on your own time using your own equipment, but depending on the idea and your own personal resources, that may or may not be possible.
Seems common based on annual reports (Score:3, Informative)
Cash patent bonus programs appear to be common. Public companies will mention them in their 10-K filings as it is often part of executive compensation (generally not limited to just executives, it just gets mentioned with executive compensation because they have to report on executive compensation.) Just google '"annual report" "patent bonus"' and '10-k "patent bonus"' and '"executive compensation" "patent bonus"'.
Re:Patent Programs-- (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Royalties are better. (Score:3, Informative)
Where I work, we do regular reviews of our issued patents to determine which were valuable and which were not. The valuable ones win the inventors an incentive award. And, since it's a company full of engineers, yes, we do have fancy schmancy formulas that drive the process, and determine the amount of the award. (There are also fixed awards for "decision to file" and "patent issued.")
Assigning specific patent royalty amounts rarely makes sense. Sometimes you can point to specific licensing actions that generate revenue associated with a specific patent, but most often you can't. Many patents are cross licensed to other companies through bulk cross licensing agreements. Others just form a "mutually assured destruction" sort of bulwark against other companies. (This latter property doesn't work so well against patent trolls, since trolls don't make anything--they just have their patent(s) that they chase people with.) Thus, we tend to look at how much revenue was associated with products that use the patent (whether the revenue was ours or someone else's) and go from there.
As for my background: I'm a member of one of our internal committees that reviews disclosures to determine what to file. At the very least, that acts as a quality filter internally. I've also filed several patent disclosures of my own, and have even had a few patents issue. Some have even gotten incentive awards in those periodic reviews. :-) I'm not a big fan of the patent system, but as long as it's there, I figure I may as well use it and let it die under its own weight.
Re:patent incentives (Score:3, Informative)
At our company, all patent disclosures are reviewed by other technical experts to determine their suitability to file. After all, it isn't free to file patents. Thus, there's a scale: Small bonus for decision to file to encourage disclosures, larger bonus for the patent issuing, and a variable bonus some years later on review as I talk about here [slashdot.org].
The technical guy isn't the one that would be flooding the patent office with bogus disclosures in an attempt to write himself an endless stream of bonus checks. There's always at least one layer that could catch the bogons: the patent attorney that drafts the patent and works all the procedural issues. I suggest an additional layer of technical review to sort good from bad and to prioritize among the good so the most important ones get filed first.