An incomplete, biased, or politically motivated investigation and determination can lead, ultimately, to the issuance of an invalid patent. Under U.S. patent law, only a true and original inventor may apply for a patent. The true and original inventor may be a single person or a group of people. Also, a patent application must only name people as inventors. A company or other legal entity cannot be named as an inventor in a patent application.
Confusion sometimes arises when the concepts of inventorship and ownership become mixed.
If all of the inventors had agreed, as a condition of employment, to assign their inventions to the company, the company owns the invention. The inventors, however, are named in the patent application. Hence, the question of inventorship is separate from the question of ownership. The conception of an invention is complete if the inventor is able to make a disclosure that would enable one skilled in the art to actually make the invention without extensive research or experimentation. One who merely constructs the invention based on the inventor's conception is not an inventor.