Innovative Experts in Your Industry – Think Twice on Signing an NDA
If you are an inventor and somewhat of an expert in your industry, then you need to be very careful in signing an NDA or non-disclosure agreement and you are probably wondering why? Well, it is quite simple actually, you see, if you are at the top of your industry’s food chain and part of that elite 1% there will be many start-ups that will try to secure themselves from you competing with them.
So, when someone asks you to sign a NDA, let me give you a recent script I recently used. Someone asked me if I’d be interested in working on a new project, and that they wanted to have me sign an NDA with them. It did not make a lot of sense, but they told me they’d explain what they were doing and show me a power point presentation if I signed it. Here is what I told them:
“I was thinking about something. You see, I honestly do not believe that anyone has come up with any concepts in this industry that I have not thought of, and with regards these types of technologies. That plus what I’ve read in journals, tech magazines, student research projects and such, I doubt there is much I don’t know about already.
Even if there were applications or uses of these technologies that I had not yet considered; spending a few hours of focused thought on the topic, I doubt I couldn’t come up with more applications and even surpass anything anyone on your “team” is working on, no matter what level they have participated in within any industry or where they may have borrowed those technologies from.
Thus, signing a NDA doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me. I have nothing to gain by it, and everything to lose if in the future I design something similar. I really do not believe that your team’s knowledge is so overwhelming that it has come up with anything so revolutionary and beyond my innovative exploits.
So, I do not feel comfortable signing anything like that having to do with “any” new concept in this industry. Do you see that issue? It’s a little tough for me to sign away rights to ideas I’ve probably already had, even if I do not plan on capitalizing on “most all” of them due to time. Does that make sense to you?
The enticement of looking at a “PowerPoint presentation” isn’t enough to warrant signing a NDA with your group, and even if you had the prototype working, it’s not like I could not conceive of that in my mind since I am up on all these technologies as of today’s research email news alerts from around the world, or improve upon your design once completed, thus, being able to sell your team my improvements”
Try that next time someone asks you to sign a NDA. Please consider all this, as it could save you hundreds of thousands of dollars during your lifetime.
