IBM pays employees a $500 bonus if their patent proposal gets past an internal review board, and another $500 if the patent office actually awards the patent. The internal review board's only concern is if the patent application is likely to be successful. They don't care if the idea is silly or has no bearing on the company's business.

A small subset of employees file the vast majority of IBM's patents. These are awarded the title "Master Inventor". Many Master Inventors earn more from the patent bonuses than they do in actual salary. In theory the title is an accolade but in practice Master Inventors are sometimes shunned because they spend all their time thinking up silly patent ideas instead of doing "real work".

Source: I used to work for IBM and collected a handful of those bonuses before I realized how silly it was.