When I worked at Dell they were giving out cash bonuses for people to submit patent ideas with different levels of rewards depending on how far your patent idea got in the process.
The crazy thing is, some people (mostly the Indian cohort) were flat out coming up with idea's and submitting them to the internal patent committee every week/month since the amount offered for them would be the equlivent of 6 months/1 years salary.
The crazy thing is, some people (mostly the Indian cohort) were flat out coming up with idea's and submitting them to the internal patent committee every week/month since the amount offered for them would be the equlivent of 6 months/1 years salary.