The Best Way to Protect Your Idea

Somebody working in a big company in India reached out to me with the question "How can you prevent that a great new idea will be stolen?". He is afraid his awesome idea will be stolen and will be presented to top management in his company by others. Of course this tells us something on the corporate culture in big organizations. Do you recognize this? I hope not, but I suspect a lot of you will do.

Picasso said "Good artists copy. Great artists steal." To be quite frank: we all get inspired by new impressions, new insights and best practices from others all the time and mix them in our mind to come up with new solutions for our own challenges. I guess everyone of us "steals" to some extent. That's how we learn, isn't it? I love to quote one of my favorite film makers, Jim Jarmush:

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.”

Fact is, if you have a truly great idea, someone is bound to want to steal it.

Now does this mean that you should not share you idea with your colleagues? Or that you should not share your start-up-idea with partners you will need to make your dream come true? Of course not: innovation is transforming ideas into invoices. And you need a lot of people to get this done. Now you might think of patenting your idea. Unfortunately a patent protects inventions and not ideas. An other option is let everybody you talk to on the idea sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). In practice that is not going to bring your idea to the market fast, does it? And a signed NDA is no guarantee it will not be 'stolen'.

A very practical way to prevent others to be successful with your fabulous idea is to execute your idea yourself better and faster than anyone else can. In an existing company take your idea yourself to top management with a well written business case for it. I just wrote a post on this last week: 'How to present Your Idea to Top Management'. As a potential start-up you know of course someone else will try to copy you. That's for sure. So you have to get all the abilities and resources on board and execute your idea in a fast, unique and excellent way

Great and fast execution is the best protection for your idea

Take a company like Amazon.com for example. Jeff Bezos knew others would start to sell books online. He did a perfect job in executing online retailing in an innovative way, making Amazon very successful.
Wishing you lots of success becoming the intrapreneur or entrepreneur executing your fabulous idea in an excellent way.