Successful Innovation Programs Require a Comprehensive Inventor Care Program
Who is an inventor? Anyone within your organization who will contribute ideas to the program. Ideally, as many people as possible within the organization.
In our view, the best programs are enterprise-wide, but in some organizations, you may need to restrict it to a smaller group. In one organization, a major retailer we worked with, we ran the program within the e-commerce group (around 3,000 employees), with an eye to eventually extending it to the entire organization (which at the time had 2M global employees). The reason for extending it to everyone? You never know where your next billion dollar idea will come from. In our experience, it could come from anywhere within the organization, even some far-flung sales office. It usually never pays to exclude anyone. (Although, for IP purposes, you may need to exclude all non-full-time employees – consult with your legal department on this)