I loved this story when I read it in "Surely you are Joking..." It is exactly how it still works at large Tech-Corps. Number of Patents filed is a metric the PHBs love to use in order to determine the innovativeness of departments and there is a nice bonus for submitting your ideas to the patent-process. Middle management is running around asking people whether they could think of anything they could submit because that will make the department look good - and there you go... loads of BS-patents and I bet you that Dollar that this is exactly how he Microsoft page-turn-gesture-thing became a patent.