Please forgive all the miss spelled words above. it posted accidentally before i could run it through my spell checker. Now you know one of my weak ness’s theirs many more.

Todd,

As a designer of 30 years I can tell you the main benefit. It’s called a paycheck.
And Yes, these agreements can be a handicap. A company hiring and paying you for creativity expects to give you special insight and training in their field that could give you a competitive edge in competing against them. They need to protect themselves. Any ideas you dream up as a result of that information should belong to them.
However, you don’t always have to sign the generic agreement. There is often room for negotiation. If they ask you to sign a document regarding all future ideas, run! Ideas unrelated to or non-competing with the company hiring you should have some option to pursue yourself, on your own time and at your own expense, maybe with permission. Honest companies try not to be unreasonable. Ideas that happen after you leave the company, or maybe after some preset allowance like 6 months after leaving , should be yours to keep. If you are permanently laid off or fired the agreement should end immediately.
I am not a lawyer, so please don’t consider this legal advice.
Jobs are hard to find right now, so be careful how hard you negotiate.

Thanks Mark,
That’s is exactly what I was looking for, a little of what goes on behind those close doors after you start the R&D job.

I’m definitely going to stay put job wise. Even though my job duties have changed, I relies sometimes its our (the employees) turn to have any say, and sometimes (right now) its the employers turn.

Thanks again

Mark,

You might want to consider negotiating the contract if not now then maybe when you are in a better position to do so. In my first R&D job, they’re standard contract had all rights to any idea that was in their line of work, which really can be anything depending on who you work for. I actually came up with an idea 7 years ago that is now just catching on and the patent will likely rake in big $$$ for them – what kills me is that I came up with the idea almost independently of them, but I was bound by the contract that doesn’t stipulate royalties, bonuses, etc.

I now work for a company that will return to you 25% of the profits that your idea/invention would bring in. It’s no wonder to me why this company is known for producing the latest and greatest; the employees are directly rewarded for their innovative thinking.

Juan,

What’s the name of that company, and are they hiring?

Mark,

Jet Propulsion Laboratory – Caltech.

Unfortunately not hiring right now, but we do have steady NASA contracts that are keeping us afloat.

Todd, I worked in the nuclear industry for 20 years and had to sign a non-compete document. I went to their legal department and showed them a couple of ideas I had ,like a new type of Yo-Yo and asked them how that toy could possibly be related to my work. They agreed and we decided I would run my ideas past legal and they would in turn give me a release form for all items non-work related to the nuclear industry. Little did they know I had 168 sell sheets at the time ready to send out they had to review and fill out release forms for. It took them a couple of weeks to complete, but put me in the clear so that my job was not in danger and they knew I was upfront with them. They also benefited from my work related ideas.

I developed a product called the “Super Sleever” while working for them at Savannah River Site. Westingouse ran the 200,000 acre facility as a subcontractor for the government. You can see the SuoerSleever device on my website and read more on it here http://www.p2pays.org/ref/14/13978.htm . It saved the company roughly 4 million a year in waste reduction. I had gone through the company’s IDEAs program and gotten the device patented. Westinghouse had their own onsite patent lawyer and development group. They had a policy that if you developed a product and it was licensed you got 25% of the royalties from all non-government sales. That was one draw back to the program. They were real big on pushing the device to all DOE sites nationwide and I even won the National DOE Pollution Prevention award. I was the only individual to win that award. Normally it was won by teams of engineers focusing on some research funded project. So, needless to say I was proud of my accomplishment, but was disappointed that it was not being pushed into the commercial world where I would get royalties on the sales.
The development group was supposed to find companies wanting to license the products they got patented, but wasn’t real decent at it. After 18 months of the development group not finding any interested companies I asked if I could give it a try. They were reluctant to let me since I was not a member of their staff, but after a lot of prodding they decided I could try if I notified them of any interested parties.
Two weeks after I started looking I found an interested company. I went to the development group and told them I had a meeting set up for the next day. They asked me who and where. They were stunned when I told them it was the VP of Product Development at Bartlett Nuclear and he was flying in from Massachusetts just to meet us.
The next day I went with a representative of the development group to meet the VP. We met in the lobby of his hotel and he asked where the product was located. I said it was in my car trunk in the parking garage. I told him I would get it and we could go to a meeting room inside the hotel for a demonstration. The VP said we could just do the demo at my car. So, here we are standing in a half lit parking deck as I am giving my pitch and showing how the device worked. I was concerned about doing the demo in the parking garage because the Super Sleever looks like a rocket launcher. All I could think about was some security guard watching us on a video camera thinking we were about to blow up the building. LOL
The demo took about 5 minutes. After the demo I was expecting and prepared for numerous questions. Instead I was pleasantly surprised when he looked at me and said “Can I get an exclusive license on this?”
We went back inside the hotel and dicussed terms on the license. As we were heading out of the parking deck the Development group representative said how he was amazed I could get all this done in two weeks when his department had worked on it for 18 months with no results. I told him it was because I wanted it more than they did and I am persistent.

http://www.rogerbrown.net

That’s F’n Bad-Ass Roger! (pardon my french)

William, I second what you just said.
What’s really cool Roger, is no matter what accomplishments you acquire, you can tell you have somehow been able to keep one foot on the ground, base on your willingness to give back to us, Thanks again.

Great story Roger!

Thank you. I have gotten a lot of nice comments for the story in this month’s ID magazine.
Hopefully I will get to do more of them.

http://www.rogerbrown.net