On sharing ideas
Why we fear it, and why we shouldn't, when to share them, and when not to
Key Lessons:
It is normal that you feel anxious sharing your idea, even though there is no need to.
Execution >>> Ideas
Share your idea, rather than a detailed plan, to avoid your idea being “stolen”.
IP law (rightly) not available to mere ideas.
Sharing your ideas is a great way to have a positive impact, and essential to find your “real idea”.
1. Why we fear sharing ideas and why we shouldn’t
That ideas aren’t valuable by themselves is common knowledge amongst the most successful entrepreneurs. Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, the most famous startup accelerator and seed capital firm in the world, stated in his essay “Ideas for Startups”:
Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.
Whilst true in a strict economic sense (though, I believe and argue below, not in a wider cultural sense), such statements don’t address the fact that we often feel attached to our ideas and fear sharing them. I believe our attachment can be good, but only to an extent: It gives us the motivation and resilience to test our ideas and push through challenges. At the same time, however, we don’t want to become too attached. An attack on our idea should not feel like an attack on us.
I think the fear of sharing ideas stems from two opposite but interconnected fears: We seem to simultaneously fear that our idea is complete rubbish and others will find it (us) stupid, and that our idea might be so good that someone else will steal it and become super successful because of it.
I believe both fears are understandable (even if not ultimately correct) and can be accommodated to an extent on a platform such as Impact Drive that encourages open idea sharing. Regarding the fear of being seen as naïve (which I certainly had/ have when talking about Impact Drive): The kind of people who will be attracted to Impact Drive (and generally the people you would feel comfortable to share your idea with), are unlikely those who would make fun of you. Whilst I cannot control how people will react in your personal life, hateful comments will not be tolerated on Impact Drive. That said, we should not take attacks on our ideas as attacks on us. If one of our ideas is genuinely bad, finding this out sooner allows us to move onto our next idea sooner.
Regarding the fear of stealing ideas: As stated, almost all value is created through execution. Yet, this does not mean that there is absolutely no risk of your idea be “stolen” (I put the word stealing in quotation marks, because, as discussed below, it is questionable whether our ideas belong to us).
Mark Zuckerberg stealing the idea for Facebook is probably the most famous example. Zuckerberg was employed by the twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and their dorm-mate Divya Narendra to build a social networking site “The Harvard Connection”. Zuckerberg launched Facebook in secret first whilst delaying their project launch. Zuckerberg got sued and settled for $170 million in FB shares in 2008, but the twins’ claim to reopen the case was dismissed. Whilst I in no way want to excuse Zuckerberg’s dubious and unethical behavior, I think even in this case, it isn’t clear what exactly was stolen: Social networking sites existed before the Harvard Connection project; as such, the idea was not “theirs”. These existing social networks were however unsuccessful, partly because of the difficulty in using them, and their unattractive design. Zuckerberg spent the time and effort to make the platform appealing and accessible. He was, after all, the person with the skills to execute the idea. Furthermore, the Harvard Connection site was an idea limited to Harvard students. It was Zuckerberg who saw the ideas’ potential to become a global platform. He also came up with his own ideas to keep Facebook relevant, e.g., introducing a tagging feature, the possibility to have a private profile, and a news feed. And finally, the twins did get $170 million in FB shares, which, for sharing an idea (that already existed) and not ultimately executing it, doesn’t seem like such a bad deal to me. You can read more about the case here.
Of course, you may well wish to avoid such a situation. As the value of an idea lies in its’ details and execution, I believe sharing the broad idea, rather than a detailed plan, is preferable at first. Once you establish trust with potential co-founders, you can go more into detail. Within the Impact Drive community, you will be able to decide how much, and with whom, you wish to share.
The story of Facebook also highlights that you don’t need to be a first mover (i.e., the first to have an idea) to dominate a market, further proving that the idea is way less important than the execution. If you have a successful idea competition will inevitably follow. You must then uphold your competitive advantage by creating superior value for your customers. Second movers and late movers such as Facebook have distinct advantages over first movers: They benefit from the first movers’ efforts in building the market, which they can then disrupt (as Apple did with Blackberry). And importantly, they can learn from the first movers mistakes (as Zuckerberg learned to focus on an appealing and easy-to-use design). Whether it is better to be a first or second mover depends on your product or service and industry. You can read more about this here.
2. When should we not share our ideas: Can our ideas be legally protected?
At this point, you may wonder whether you can legally protect your ideas through Intellectual Property (IP) law.
The short answer is no – your idea cannot be legally protected through IP law.
IP law only protects tangible manifestations of your idea. Copyright can protect expressions of your idea – but not the idea itself (though distinguishing expressions from ideas can be difficult). For instance, if you write a recipe as a poem, the poem (the expression) will be protected through copyright; The recipe (the idea) and the general idea of writing recipes as poems will not. Trade secrets only help if you have information that is commercially valuable because it is secret – e.g., Googles’ search engine algorithms - and your company is taking reasonable measures to conceal the information from the public. Most ideas wouldn’t qualify as they don’t have intrinsic commercial value, and will lose their secrecy once you start executing (e.g., Googles’ idea of building a search algorithm isn’t secret, the actual algorithm is). Finally, patents protect inventions, and going from an idea to an invention requires the fulfilment of stringent requirements. Broadly speaking, the invention must fall within patentable subject matter (e.g., business model or scientific theories are excluded); be useful in industry; novel (i.e., not cover anything already existing); and contain an inventive step (i.e., not be obvious given what was previously known).
I have included further resources at the end of the post that go into greater detail regarding the different IP rights.
Important: If you believe your idea might be protectable through a trade secret or patent – and you wish to claim these rights – do not share your idea in detail with anyone barring further legal protection (such as a non-disclosure agreement). In this case, I strongly encourage you to seek legal advice (this post is intended for educational purposes only).
That a mere idea cannot be protected may reinforce our desire to not share it. Yet, it is in all our interest that our ideas aren’t protected. Ideas belong to the “public domain” (creative work not protected by IP). Public goods entail things that cannot be claimed by any individual, i.e., belong to everyone, such as air quality. I think ideas are metaphorically comparable to air – without them, our intellectual and cultural progress would suffocate. By only granting protection over physical manifestations of an idea, after certain further conditions are met, IP law rightly recognises the difficulty in defining and delimiting intangible ideas. It is extremely difficult to determine who can make a genuine claim over an idea being theirs, given that our ideas are closely embedded in our collective knowledge. We all steal ideas from each other. Claiming IP law over ideas would also stall future innovation. It would undermine the whole idea of a competitive market, as you couldn’t compete by executing the same idea better (e.g., serving more delicious coffee in the same neighbourhood).
3. The value of sharing ideas
Just because unexecuted ideas don’t have intrinsic economic value and cannot be protected through IP law, doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable in a broader sense. I think your ideas, especially if you put in the time and effort to develop them further, are your unique gifts to share with the world – gifts, that, I believe, can have a tremendous positive impact. A rich idea space is for entrepreneurs what good air quality is for all of us - An essential element for clear and creative thinking.
Having a positive impact is not a zero-sum game – the greater the total impact achieved, the better. Your potential for impact is not diminished by someone else’s’ work – even if you both have the same idea and chose not to collaborate, this frees up one of you to work on another issue. Sadly, or fortunately (depends on how you look at it), there are more than enough problems in the world for each of us to carve our niche and have a positive impact.
More pragmatically, sharing our ideas is also necessary to develop something valuable. Coming back to Paul Graham’s essay on “Ideas for Startups”. He states:
“The fact is, most startups end up nothing like the initial idea. It would be closer to the truth to say the main value of your initial idea is that, in the process of discovering it's broken, you'll come up with your real idea.“
To come up with the “real idea” we must, according to Graham, share it in the right environment:
“The right environment for having startup ideas need not be a university per se. It just has to be a situation with a large percentage of school.
It's obvious why you want exposure to new technology, but why do you need other people? Can't you just think of new ideas yourself? The empirical answer is: no. Even Einstein needed people to bounce ideas off. Ideas get developed in the process of explaining them to the right kind of person. You need that resistance, just as a carver needs the resistance of the wood.“
My hope is that Impact Drive will be such a school.
Thank you and all the best,
Caroline
Sources and Further Resources
Essay Paul Graham:
Graham, P. (2005, October). Ideas for Startups. Www.paulgraham.com. http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html
Facebook Story:
Manjoo, F. (2011, April 12). Mark Zuckerberg Invented Facebook. Slate. https://slate.com/technology/2011/04/facebook-was-invented-by-mark-zuckerberg-not-the-winklevoss-twins-get-over-it.html#:~:text=Who%20came%20up%20with%20the
Press, G. (2018, April 8). Why Facebook Triumphed Over All Other Social Networks. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2018/04/08/why-facebook-triumphed-over-all-other-social-networks/
Second Mover Advantage:
Shankar, V., & Carpenter, G. (2013). The Second-Mover Advantage. Kellogg Insight. https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/the_second_mover_advantage
Intellectual Property Law:
Aplin, T., & Davis, J. (2021, October 21). Intellectual Property Law: Text, Cases, and Materials. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Retrieved 15 Jun. 2023, from https://www.oxfordlawtrove.com/view/10.1093/he/9780198842873.001.0001/he-9780198842873.
Moore, A., & Himma, K. (2018). Intellectual Property (E. N. Zalta, Ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intellectual-property/#Copy
Frequently Asked Questions: Copyright. (n.d.). Www.wipo.int. Retrieved June 14, 2023, from https://www.wipo.int/copyright/en/faq_copyright.html#accordion__collapse__03_
Frequently Asked Questions: Trade Secrets. (n.d.). Www.wipo.int. Retrieved June 14, 2023, from https://www.wipo.int/tradesecrets/en/tradesecrets_faqs.html
WIPO. (2019). Frequently Asked Questions: Patents. Wipo.int. https://www.wipo.int/patents/en/faq_patents.html
World Intellectual Property Organization. (2016). What is Intellectual Property? Wipo.int. https://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/
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