Unlike authorship of a scientific publication, inventorship is determined in accordance with South African patent law. It is not uncommon for the inventors on a patent application to not be the same as the authors on a corresponding scientific publication. A lawful inventor is one who makes an inventive contribution to one or more of the patent claims that formally define the invention. Someone who provides equipment, space or money, no matter how critical to the development of the invention, is not an inventor. Also, someone who only performs work under the supervision of another party is not an inventor, even though that person may have worked long hours or conducted a critical experiment. An issued patent that fails to correctly and completely name the inventors may be ruled invalid under certain circumstances.
Patent claims may change as the patent application is being drafted and also while it is undergoing prosecution by the patent office, the names of the inventors may change as well. For the purposes of filing your disclosure with the Innovation Office, you will need to include the name(s) of the inventors as those individuals who you believe have made a creative contribution to the invention (a creative contribution may include contributing a seminal idea towards the conception of the invention or overcoming a technical hurdle in the reduction to practice of the invention).