What is a divisional application? Or, what is an election / restriction requirement?
A divisional application is one that is filed after an initial non-provisional patent application is filed and in which the PTO examiner says that the initial application has claims for two or more different inventions. A patent can only claim a single invention. If the PTO examiner believes that more than one invention is being claimed, the PTO examiner will require an election of claims by making a Restriction Requirement. In such a case, one possible response is to delete the claims for one of the inventions from the parent application and file those deleted claims in a second, divisional application. If the claims for both inventions are found allowable, the inventor will end up with two patents.
