Slashdot Mirror
Designing a Patent-Incentive Program?
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?"
We are a research driven company and a really fun place to work.
A patent gets you an invite to a very yummy annual dinner, with a nice talk by the CEO.
Oh, five hundred bucks cash, too, not to mention one of those spiffy patent plaques.
Some of the heavy hitters have rows of them in their offices.
Journal papers get you the same treatment. Conference papers get you nothing, alas, since plenty of the researchers crank them out.
But right now your humble AC just wishes he could get another conference paper published, dinner or no dinner...