Patents are used to protect a inventions. You cannot patent a idea.
You pay inventors to develop their idea into a workable product, build models, and write a detailed description of how it works and what features make it unique.
In my company, I was the person who reviewed inventions in my engineering field and made monthly presentations to the patent committee. Its very expensive to proceed with a patent, so I had to include answers to several questions.
1. Is the invention practical? That is, would it really be useful to anyone.
2. Is the invention valuable to the company?
3. Will the company use it now or in the future.
And, I had options for recommendations.
1. Approve and proceed with development and submission of the patent ($$$$).
2. Send back to the inventor for further development, it sounds useful but is not complete.
3. Reject with reason, it could be a workable patent that the company would not benefit from, in which case, I could and often did recommend giving full rights to the inventor so he owned the invention.
I remember one patent that was software so I was not involved, it came with a company we merged with. It was a windowing method for dealing with Y2K in existing software that let you use a date that had just 2 digits (54 for 1954). The patent was deemed as not valuable to the company, so rights were given to the inventor. It turned out to be very valuable and was widely used.
That was the year I retired, so I never followed up on the end result of the patent review.