[tom_b]

My experience at IBM in the US (six years worth) was that management "strongly suggested" patent submissions as part of the review/promotion game.

On one occasion at a meeting of a second-line managers entire org (4 or 5 teams), an employee questioning the utility of making patent submissions a numbers game (e.g, everybody better submit some) was told - with limited paraphrasing - "Hey, 1,000 people on the street want your job and will do the work plus publish technical reports plus submit patents for less money. You should keep that in mind."

I suspect, but didn't really know enough people in other software group divisions to verify, that this particular managerial mindset may have been more tied to our specific division than IBM "in the large."

[mquirion]

Oh yeah. This sounds familiar (6 years at IBM). Very familiar. I wasn't even in the software division. I was in GBS. EVERY thing we did would get discussed and executives would ALWAYS ask if it could be patented. Half the time stupid, normal stuff like making AJAX requests to improve a web page's UX or embedding a browser in some piece of software would be cause for execs to encourage us to try to get a patent for it. It's insane. IBM will one day be the world's largest non-practicing entity.