Q: Is it mandatory to assign the names of the developers / designers of the product along with the inventors?
A:
A patent must list all people who are inventors. The list must be exact; not more, not less, not different. Whether someone is an inventor or not is a complicated process, but one that the attorney must ascertain correctly in order to get a valid patent. In many cases, a developer or a designer may be considered to be an inventor.
There really is no way of listing other people who helped, but their activity was not sufficient to consider them to be an inventor. This is unfortunate, because in many cases the laboratory technicians may have done a lot more work on the invention than the inventor, but their name is not found anywhere in the patent.
There are several ways of handling this problem failing to recognize the contributions of individuals who couldn’t be listed on the patent. One way is for the patent owner (typically a company for which the contributors work) to give an award for a patent to all team members, not just the inventors. Another way is to include the names of the non-inventors in the list of authors on any journal article that discloses the subject matter of the previously filed patent application. I’ve also seen patents which include in the specification a paragraph thanking the non-inventors.
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