Remuneration of Employee Inventions: Building a Typology of Existing Approaches

Abstract

Remuneration of employee inventions in corporations is a relatively controversial topic in the field of intellectual property, and in many countries, there are ongoing lawsuits over the amount of remuneration between the inventor and the employer. The available scholarly literature as well as professional sources suggest that there are many ways to how a country approaches remuneration legislation and practice, however there is a lack of homogenization of these approaches. To fill this gap, this chapter aims to find and define several recognizable types of compensation that exist in the world and their underlying principles and theories. We use an Eisenhardt’s comparative template for qualitative theory-building research (multiple case study) and formulate four recognizable types of approaches to the remuneration of employee inventions. The results of this chapter can serve, for example, innovative corporations in the correct setting of the reward mechanism for employee inventions when entering various foreign markets.