Inventor awards scheme are widely recognised as useful in ensuring the engagement of engineers and developers with your innovation strategy.

Generally, the awards are made to each individual inventor named on an invention disclosure and/or in a patent application. However, some schemes provide the individual amounts set out below up to a certain maximum, say three times this amount and the amount is then split between all of the named inventors in the event that there are three or more inventors. Great care should be taken to ensure that inventor details are disclosed accurately; that is to include all of those who have made a genuine technical contribution to the development of an idea as this can have significant legal implications in terms of ownership of the invention/patents.

Note that some schemes provide a bonus to inventors in the event that an idea is dropped through commercial reasons rather than patentability reasons. Typically, this bonus might be in the order of several hundred Euros.

When providing these award schemes, it is often a very good idea to ensure that your contracts of employment also include a section obliging inventors to assist in prosecution of patent applications even after they have left your employment. This should include assistance in analysing prior art and in particular signing documents as may be required by various patent authorities to ensure that the granted patent is in the correct name of the employer. For example, US patent applications are filed in the names of inventors and an assignment filed assigning the individual right of the US patent application to the employer, even though under national laws for the relevant inventor/employee, the true owner should be the employer.

As you will see from the table the variety of schemes is quite wide as is the financial reward; the average remuneration being about €1320 per inventor across the patent filing and product development cycle.