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IBM pays employees a $500 bonus if their patent proposal gets past an internal review board, and another $500 if the patent office actually awards the patent.
by foreigner 8y ago
IBM pays employees a $500 bonus if their patent proposal gets past an internal review board, and another $500 if the patent office actually awards the patent. The internal review board's only concern is if the patent application is likely to be successful. They don't care if the idea is silly or has no bearing on the company's business.
A small subset of employees file the vast majority of IBM's patents. These are awarded the title "Master Inventor". Many Master Inventors earn more from the patent bonuses than they do in actual salary. In theory the title is an accolade but in practice Master Inventors are sometimes shunned because they spend all their time thinking up silly patent ideas instead of doing "real work".
Source: I used to work for IBM and collected a handful of those bonuses before I realized how silly it was.
- Retra 8y ago>They don't care if the idea is silly or has no bearing on the company's business. That's not entirely true. They do, perhaps approximately, require that the idea be within a market that IBM could consider moving into if they wanted.
- lozaning 8y agoI seem to recall being told at one point while interning there that you couldn't get on the management track within Tivoli with less than 5 patents to your name. I was always super jealous of the patent plaques people would have made and hang in their office when one got approved.
- P_I_Staker 8y ago> Many Master Inventors earn more from the patent bonuses than they do in actual salary. So if we're being extremely conservative about pay at IBM, they're able to churn out 60+ patents per year? So more than one successful patent per week, every year?
- foreigner 8y agoYes!