| Glad to see someone questioning what has become conventional wisdom (and I have been guilty of repeating in the past) because a few popular writers made it so. There are some great points in the article and it prompted me to add a few thoughts that I've had on the subject. If ideas were worthless, you wouldn't have the patent industry, intellectual property laws, royalty licensing, etc. These industries have their faults, to be sure, but there is also a legitimate use of IP laws to protect smaller startups from large corporations. And these laws exist because ideas are valuable. The value of ideas becomes relevant to entrepreneurs when you have to decide whether to share an idea with a partner, potential investor or prospect client. My advisor tells me repeatedly "if you talk about one of your ideas with no NDA or similar mechanism in place, you have just given that person or corporation a gift. It's no longer solely yours." Most of the large corporations I deal with understand when I request an NDA before getting into the details of any conversation. Most of the times I've heard or read about people refusing to sign NDAs is when entrepreneurs deal with VCs. They have their reasons for refusing to sign up front, which include the reasoning that they hear hundreds of ideas everyday and aren't going to take the time to sign an NDA for each one. A line of thinking that tends to derive from this is that there are no unique ideas anymore, but I don't think this is true and it shouldn't be taken for granted. When dealing with VCs, it's even more important to understand that if you give too much away without signing that NDA, not only are you giving them a gift, you're giving it to someone who has both lots of money and strong connections to others with the technical ability and experience to act on it. And they don't think ideas are worthless. |