If you are a creative studio, who owns employees ideas that they come up with whilst in your employ?

We are a creative studio who depend on new ideas and new IP to survive. Many of our staff (naturally) are quite creative as well, and as such don't want their best ideas taken by the studio - where the employee continue to get their usual salary but the studio makes lots of cash. They would rather save their best ideas for their own execution.

How do other companies deal with this? Firstly, what kind of wording do we need in contracts? and secondly, is there a win-win that can be achieved, or not?

Obviously, there is no possibility to include in any contract that you own your employees ideas. Ideas are in the head of people, and if they don't want to share them, you have absolutely no way to force them to do so, even during work time (in fact the only method to achieve that is called torture!).

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that in your contracts you can only include that their actual work (production) is owned by the company.

So you're on the right track speaking about incentives. Let's check what can motivate your employees to give their ideas to the company.

First, are your employees happy to work in the company? This is the first step. If employees are not happy (because of low wages, bad work atmosphere, and so on) they won't be very motivated to share their ideas.

Second, do you have incentives to reward them for the good ideas they share with the company? It may be bonuses, gifts, promotions, week ends in in a great place — there is plenty of possible bonuses that would motivate them.

Third, do you authorize them to promote their company work? Do you credit them for the ideas they have shared? If they know they will be able to show to the world the good work they done in the company, they will be more motivated to give their ideas to the company. I know however it's not possible in all cases, given some of your company's customers ask for confidentiality about credits.

Fourth, do you give them some time to work on their ideas on work time? If they are all the week working on your customer's projects, they will necessarily take time to develop their new ideas at home, not at the office. Think about Google, giving their developers one day per week to work on personal projects. Numerous Google products have been created this way (will add references about that tomorrow). This is a tech company, but this way to let people be creative can be easily transposed to creative ones.

Anyway, it's a common problem in any creative companies, and there is no easy way to solve it. And it's not necessarily a bad thing, world is moving, people is moving, and you won't force people to stay in your company and continue sharing their ideas. You'll have new employees, maybe more motivated, willing to share their ideas, at least for a while. Sorry for this philosophical thought, I know it's not the place, but I think you have to take this in account.

In the end, it is all about trust.

Your employees need to trust that their great ideas won't be ignored or exploited with no recognition. You need to trust that your employees will use their best endeavours for the benefit of the company.

Contract terms are not the way to go about this, as this won't build trust on either side.

Here's an example: I used to work for a telecoms company, doing their billing software. I discovered that they were losing millions of dollars a month to fraud. Actually, it wasn't really a fraud, it was just someone clever enough to exploit a loophole. I could have done the same thing myself, but as there was two-way trust, I went to the management and told them what was happening, so it could be shut down.

Define the scope of their work and if they're paid for their ideas, they should be producing good ideas every 10 or 15 minutes on demand. You need employees who believe in the mantra of the company, who will contribute to its success.

As far as researchers go, they should be happy when they give away their ideas. Instead of focusing on this research for 10 or 15 more years and finding a way to build a company around their idea, now they can focus on other, better ideas. It frees them. Gives them options. Let some business person do the work while you get to keep being creative and learning.