Is that just a flat $2500, no profit/royalty sharing? Seems like a good way to get people to churn out lots of low quality patents.

I like the scheme where I work--there's a relatively small cash bonus (a few hundred bucks), but the inventors get a nice chunk of any income from the patent. Another slice goes to the inventor's department's budget, so they can indirectly benefit there too.

When I was at Microsoft, it was $1000 and a trophy called a 'Patent Cube". I knew a couple of people who had a profitable sideline of manically brainstorming bullshit patents together, for every little thing they worked on. They had stacks of these trophies in their offices.

The award has gone up a bit since, but the patent cube is still well and alive. My first arrives in a few weeks. Can confirm the stacks - knew a dev who used them as raisers for his monitors and consoles.

Better than old solaris administration books!

How does that work? You may have an idea but the actual development may involve 100s of people and the patent might involve a small aspect of the product. How do assign a value to the patent?

Also you are right that this system results in lots of low quality patents. I used to see at one employer chip designers cranking out 5-6 cell designs on a quarterly basis making an $10k extra a quarter. Maybe 1% of those would actually be implemented but it is worth it for the company to get every potential solution either as prior art or patented.

If the company uses the invention, it's hard to quantify the income from the patent, but if they license the patent to another company it's very easy.

Like someone else said, mostly licensing. The place where I work is a bit unusual (non profit, don't really have "products" and when we do it's typically a small team so everyone gets to be on the patent). I'm sure it's harder to divvy up at Intel, where a new CPU generation might take advantage of dozens of patents.

If your company's business model is to license patents, then you should align your employees' incentives to that, give them money when patents are licensed. That's what your employer does.

If your company's business model is to build and sell products, and prevent competitors from being as good, and avoid getting sued, then it's beneficial to have as many patents as possible. So Intel also aligns its employees' incentives with with its business model, by giving an incentive to create as many patents as possible.

"Generous"

Is that incentive per application or per grant?

It differs by company, but is not that easily gameable. (I’ve tried many times and succeeded only once in filing an application that was completely trash). The company’s patent lawyers ultimately decide what they will and won’t file, and they are more time constrained than budget constrained).

I've seen a split approach like 50% at disclosure and 50% at grant because the employer wants to see you follow through in assisting with the paperwork. Quite a few never reach grant stage or take so long that you may have even moved to a new employer.

Usually it's per grant. It's quite common for big companies like Intel to give bonuses to the employees for filling patents.

The attitude of these companies is to incentivize employees to patent whatever they come up with, whether they intend to use the idea or not.