Ask HN: How to pitch an idea without the risk of idea theft | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to pitch an idea without the risk of idea theft

26 pointswseqyrku9 comments

The conversation might go like this: - (the idea) manager: we have/had a project with 80% overlap, this is nothing new.

The manager goes ahead and add it to the backlog and no credit is given. Easy peasy.

(the second part may not happen publicly or immediately, rather, the project would seem to be dismissed or postponed)

If you are confident enough, pitch your ideas in a more public setting like a meeting, especially if senior stakeholders are present.

There also nothing wrong with self-promotion and singing your own praise. So when discussing with others you might say something like "I got this idea and discussed with Mr Manager who liked it and added it to backlog".

You may hate this but I usually put my recommendations in PowerPoint, with my name on it and the options and suggestions. I then share it and discuss it with multiple people. If he tries to claim it, well his boss already knows or other peers of his.

At the end of the day if he does take credit and no one knows… the bright side is you had a good idea, go somewhere else where they will recognise you for it.

You've pitched the question as theft of an idea, but the tone suggests you're more worried about credit?

It's helpful to differentiate between the two - ideas aren't really worth much, but credit where its due can be important.

Equally, if you are newish to a place you'll have lots of ideas. Some of those ideas will be new, and useful. Some will be old (tried and failed) some will be old (never got high enough on the priority list.)

Perhaps the biggest disconnect though is that while your idea may be objectively good, it may not serve the goals of the organization. This can be hard to understand if you don't know the organization well.

For example, faster reports are a good thing, but 5% faster at the cost of maintainability is good in the short term, but bad in the long term.

Or you may be an expert in say Haskall, and can quickly whip up some utilities in Haskall, but your manager wants it in VB# because that's what everything else is written in, and he's concerned about life-after-you.

Lastly, and thus is going to sound harsh, but there's not a lot of "credit" for good ideas in the first place. Ultimately nobody cares who -thought- of it, they really care who -did- it (and that includes sales, management etc.)

It sounds like they're paying you for your idea. I wouldn't worry too much about theft.

If you're blindly pitching a full on project, the company likely has a process to approve projects through a committee of people. Your manager may be part of that process or may not want to deal with the bureaucracy it involves, and/or has actually heard that idea previously. There are lots of projects that don't see the light of day for many reasons.

A common refrain about startups is that ideas don't matter but execution does. If you work at the same company, how is it idea theft? What expectations do you have with credit for an idea? bigger bonus? promotion?

Create paper trail. Write a doc, share the doc;

Stop working for such companies

Ideas are dime a dozen.

Execution is the sauce.

If you are proposing ideas, have a working MVP to demonstrate this.

You seem to believe that getting credit for the idea would net you something.

I’m curious what that would be? Why do you believe your org would do it?

Some orgs reward ingenuity. Many do not.

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