Answers · Invention & Disclosures
What percentage of invention disclosures should convert into patent filings?
Updated June 2026
The short answer
A 20 to 40 percent disclosure-to-filing conversion rate is a commonly cited triage band, and it is a sound planning assumption for a corporate program with healthy disclosure volume. Conversion well below 20 percent usually signals thin disclosures or criteria misaligned with the business. Conversion well above 40 percent usually signals a starved pipeline being rubber-stamped rather than excellent triage.
The band assumes the funnel is doing its job: more disclosures arriving than the budget can file, so the committee genuinely selects. Selection requires surplus.
Reading your own conversion rate
A low rate has two common causes worth separating. Either the disclosures arrive weak (single embodiment, no mechanism, no prior art context), in which case the fix is capture quality, or the review criteria reject good inventions for reasons nobody wrote down, in which case the fix is an explicit scorecard. Interview the committee about its last ten rejections and the cause is usually obvious.
A very high rate looks like efficiency but rarely is. If 80 percent of disclosures become filings, the pipeline is delivering too few options and the committee has stopped being a filter. The cheap fix is more disclosures, not laxer review: option value is the entire point of collecting more inventions than you file.
Facilitated pipelines run hotter, by design
Capture method changes what the rate means. When disclosures arrive through facilitated harvesting, they have already been screened in the room for novelty context and business relevance, so a higher share deserves filing. One of our Fortune 500 engagements produced roughly 150 invention concepts that led to more than 80 patent applications, with a 98 percent issuance rate, well above the commonly cited band, because facilitation front-loaded the triage.
So interpret conversion together with capture: a 30 percent rate on organic submissions and a 55 percent rate on facilitated concepts can both be healthy. The number that should worry you is a high rate on a thin, unfiltered pipeline.
Manage the four lanes, not the ratio
Conversion improves as a byproduct of better decisions, so build the decision structure first. Every disclosure should land in one of four lanes: file, hold with a named re-review date, protect as a trade secret, or publish defensively to block competitors from patenting it. Each lane has real value, which means a disclosure that does not convert to a filing was not wasted.
Anchor the file lane to budget reality: every filing is a multi-year commitment across drafting, prosecution, maintenance, and any foreign filings, and our patent budget calculator can put numbers on that. We cover the committee's scoring criteria in a separate answer, linked below.
Related questions
Is converting under 20 percent always bad?
No. A deliberately tight budget, a trade-secret-heavy strategy, or a year of portfolio pruning can all justify low conversion. The problem is unexplained low conversion, where nobody can say why good disclosures are dying.
What happens to the disclosures we do not file?
Routed well, they keep working: trade secret protection for inventions you cannot detect in a competitor's product, defensive publication for inventions you mainly want to keep others from patenting, and holds for concepts whose market has not arrived.
Should we tell inventors why a disclosure was not filed?
Always, and briefly is fine. An explained no preserves the inventor for next time. Unexplained silence is the most common way committees teach engineers to stop submitting.
Do provisional applications count as conversion?
Track them separately. A provisional is a comparatively low-cost way to hold a filing date while the business case matures, and the real budget commitment is the decision to convert to a full application within the year. Your patent counsel can advise where provisionals fit your strategy.
Feed the funnel before you tune it
If your committee is filing everything it sees, the pipeline needs more inventions, and that is a solvable capture problem. The discovery call is free.
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ipCapital Group is a consultancy, not a law firm, and nothing on this page is legal advice. Dollar figures on this page are typical market ranges for professional IP services, drawn from published sources and industry experience across a variety of providers. They are not an ipCG quote or rate card; every ipCG engagement is individually scoped and priced. See how our pricing works.