Happy Late Birthday

Timely Recognition

You have probably heard or read somewhere that recognition should be done timely. We agree. Sure, it is nice to receive a token of recognition for your achievement, but does it hold as much weight if it comes six months or even a year after the fact? That’s comparable to someone telling you Happy Birthday six months after your birthday. (Sorry we missed yours!)

In addition to speaking with inventors every day, we also conduct annual surveys to get their feedback. Roughly 1 out of every 4 inventors we surveyed felt that they were recognized too long after their patent granted. Further, they indicated that the prolonged recognition reduced the overall impact of appreciation. When asked at what point in time the recognition started to mean less, a time frame of 1-3 months was given. Based on this feedback, any recognition program that isn’t recognizing inventors on a quarterly or more frequent cadence could be negatively impacting about 25% of your employees.

Recognition programs on a quarterly or monthly basis tend to engage inventors more, garnering a higher level of participation. In addition, more frequent recognition sets a consistent drumbeat, allows more opportunities to get feedback which can provide valuable insight.

Having a large annual event to recognize innovation and inventors is great; however, that means your inventors can go a whole year without any IP recognition. Our suggestion, recognize inventors for their patents throughout the year and utilize an annual event to recognize prolific inventors with milestone awards and other special recognition, such as innovator of the year for example. This recognizes them more appropriately for their extraordinary contributions while ensuring timely recognition for everyone throughout the whole year.