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Google and Apple have different innovation signatures

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11–20 of 34 posts

Re: Google and Apple have different innovation signatures

#11

This entirely ignores the politics that lead to people listed on a patent that contributed nothing. It happens a lot, if not almost always, on patents filed by employees at a large company.

Although having an inventor that you can't attribute a contribution to invalidates the patent.

Re: Google and Apple have different innovation signatures

#13
post #3

> "Over the past 10 years Apple has produced 10,975 patents with a team of 5,232 inventors, and Google has produced 12,386 with a team of 8,888," writes Wes Bernegger, data explorer at Periscopic. Those numbers are, frankly, pretty similar in terms of proportion. Ummm, Apple's 2.0977 patents per inventor and Google's 1.3936 patents per inventor are pretty _dissimilar_, I'd think, unless many companies have yet more o…

> unless many companies have yet more or far fewer

Does anyone have a source showing the distribution of patents per employee across e.g. the S&P 500, Russell 2000 and NYSE Composite members?

Re: Google and Apple have different innovation signatures

#14

Wonder if part of it has to do with incentive structures for patents? My understanding is that at Google, if you have If Apple has a different structure, this may account for the differences.

How interesting, that the company gives out bonuses for patents. I would not be surprised if Apple doesn't do this, much like how their retail staff don't get paid in commission.

Apple does give bonuses for patents, but they are of a mostly symbolic size.

Re: Google and Apple have different innovation signatures

#15

This entirely ignores the politics that lead to people listed on a patent that contributed nothing. It happens a lot, if not almost always, on patents filed by employees at a large company.

yeah I was thinking the same, and wanted to look at IBM because of that reason to see if the larger nodes matched middle meddling managers that hold the keys to the patent process, but the search turned up only some hundred patent, which is weird because it's touted as the largest patent holder ever... oh well.

Re: Google and Apple have different innovation signatures

#18

Wonder if part of it has to do with incentive structures for patents? My understanding is that at Google, if you have If Apple has a different structure, this may account for the differences.

How interesting, that the company gives out bonuses for patents. I would not be surprised if Apple doesn't do this, much like how their retail staff don't get paid in commission.

I know at least two more companies that give bonuses for patents: IBM and Motorola (before being bought by Google).

Re: Google and Apple have different innovation signatures

#19
post #4

I'm not sure I buy the argument that Apple's inventors per patent means they're a more open or egalitarian companY. The hotspots seems to suggest that Apple just has a culture of giving management credit on the patents.

Apple has an "invent this for me" culture at the very top. That does not mean those are not real patents, but I doubt if someone travels back in time from 2040 and we posit they are now are at the top of Google today, you can speak three sentences and give the instruction "invent this for me" and have your name at the top of a patent filing that essentially just prettifies those three sentences, turns them into claims, and does the prior art research.

You should be able to, because by 2040 there are lots of things that would be considered genuinely novel advancements to the state of the art today, but which can be described in three sentences.

It's a question about whether top executives can ask someone to invent something for them or not. At Google, no, at Apple, yes.

Re: Google and Apple have different innovation signatures

#20
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How interesting, that the company gives out bonuses for patents. I would not be surprised if Apple doesn't do this, much like how their retail staff don't get paid in commission.

I know at least two more companies that give bonuses for patents: IBM and Motorola (before being bought by Google).

My employer pays a decent bonus (> the $4000 cited for Google earlier) and we have a pretty small patent portfolio - I always imagined it was pretty typical for tech companies to but maybe that's not the case?
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