As long as they’re for genuine innovation and invention and not “rounded corners on a phone” or “programming structures using for-loops” then I don’t see a problem with that.
A friend of mine used to work for Siemens, and he was expected to produce at least 6 patents a year. Since innovation simply doesn’t work like that, most of them were for things like “rounded corners on a phone” or “programming structures using for-loops”.
Although IBM’s patent-producing power slowed somewhat in 2015, the number of patents it’s received so far this year is up more than 13% compared to a year earlier. The company is in the middle of a painful reinvention, that sees the company shifting further away from hardware sales into cloud computing, analytics, and AI services. It’s also plugging away on a myriad of fundamental scientific research projects—many of which could revolutionize the world if they can come to fruition—which is where many of its patent applications originate. IBM accounted for about 1% of all US patents awarded in 2015.
