[Nelson69]

Just out of curiosity, are your ideas and inventions at all related to the industry your employer is in?

I went down the road of lawyering up while I was at IBM, I was young and it was effectively a waste of money as IBM simply had no interest at all in just about any of the ideas I ever had. My manager at the time even said as much, "if you're not competing with us, we really don't care and won't steal your ideas." Worse, they knew the drill, more than one time they simply said, "these are our terms, list off your inventions, we're not going to rewrite this document.."

If your ideas are in the same realm, it seems like a larger ethical question, personally, I don't moonlight doing what I get paid to do during the day, it's just messy and I do personally believe it is not honoring the employment contract, but that's just my opinion. If they aren't related to their industry, then what's the downside of claiming the ideas? It's a two way street, they will know about the ideas but you will have told them with some degree of confidentiality being understood.