How to protect your ideas and intellectual property?

When you get in touch with external parties a fear can be they’ll steal your idea or will benefit from your intellectual property. Let me set you at rest a bit: 99% of the development agencies we work with are only interested in selling developers/teams, not in exploiting concepts. And 99% of the people who are interested will never take it into practice, anyway. In all requests we have been involved so far we’ve never had a bad experience.

However, I can understand you’d like to protect your ideas and intellectual property. Before you go into details with our partners, we’ll advise you to use Non-Disclosure Agreements, with a high fine clause. And detailed information about what they’re allowed to do and what’s not allowed. You can find template NDA’s on the Internet.

Please keep in mind innovation in the tech sector will always be prone to plagiarism. That’s why speed is key. Having relentless innovation cycles keeps your competitors constantly catching up. That does require your company to run like an Olympic runner — lean and fast.

Another tip may be to separate access to your product by different teams/developers. So, nobody will have access to the entire product.

And document your idea in the form of drawings, documents, plans and descriptions. These detailed plans will prove your ownership of your ideas. Make sure you file these plans in a dated document, so if anyone else claims your idea, you can prove that you came up with it first.