It really becomes a question of prioritization. As a small company, you can only set aside a finite amount of money, really, to cover things such as patent application and patent maintenance fees. As a company that specializes in a lot of science and engineering, we have a lot of scientists and engineers who come up with great ideas that could become patentable inventions, with appropriate funding.
We really have to sit down and prioritize what we're going to spend company funding on, in terms of investment in R and D. We may have a dozen inventions that are patent quality, but we have to then select just a small fraction of those we will actually apply for a patent on. What that means is that there are technologies that end up not coming out and seeing the light of day or that have to go on the back burner, because the costs for patenting are quite high for a small company.