Unintended Consequence of Ford's Employee Patent Incentive Award Program

What was the unintended consequence of Ford's Employee Patent Incentive Award program?

Did inventors receive the profit they expected?

The Unintended Consequence

The unintended consequence of Ford's Employee Patent Incentive Award program may be that inventors received less profit than expected.

Ford Global Technologies launched its Employee Patent Incentive Award program in 1988 to provide financial rewards to Ford employees who submitted new inventions. While the program aimed to incentivize innovation, the unintended consequence was that inventors often ended up receiving less profit from their inventions than they had anticipated.

Although patents provide inventors with legal protection for their creations, the economic value derived from patents may not fully benefit the inventors themselves. Many inventors have found that they only receive a fraction of the total economic value generated by their inventions, leading to the unintended consequence of receiving less profit than expected.