Peter is a highly regarded Agriculture Scientist with a PHD in Soil Microbials. He’s often working with farmers on innovative ways to treat their productive acres. He had a client who was growing Asparagus but was losing hundreds of kilos of product a year because weeds were strangling his crop. As an organic farmer, he couldn’t just spray them and the spray would infiltrate his product, so it would be immoral and he’d lose his ‘organic’ status. Peter and the farmer decided to try a radical solution – to burn the weeds with a gas fire rigged behind a row-cropping tractor. They enlisted a local engineering company to make the item – basically a very long narrow bar-be-que that could be pulled behind the tractor. The system worked brilliantly – the weeds died but the asparagus plants were left alone and thrived with less competition. Some months later they see the exact machine they had ‘invented’ being sold through a tractor franchise – their machine had been copied and they were given nothing for the idea. The engineering company had sold on their idea….stolen it if you will.

Geoff’s advertising agency has ideas stolen very frequently. But one experience was a real trigger for change. They had been working with a big car parts retailer for several months. One day Geoff took a concept to them for a way to reduce the massive cost of reverse logistics (mechanics sending back parts that don’t fit), by enabling the mechanics who order parts to do it more accurately. The management said they’d had the idea before, but they clearly had not, as they instantly passed the concept throughout their global network of retailers, saving the group many hundreds of millions a year. When Geoff asked what payment his team were getting for the idea that was given in confidence to the retail group, he was told they have 70 lawyers on level 5 and he'd better have deep pockets. And the manager who had stolen the idea was then promoted to their overseas headquarters with a big raise in salary. Hi Jamie! This idea theft was one of the key acts of stealing that stimulated the formation of Ideas Union. (And it’s not over yet Jamie.)

John is a renown architect designing amazingly beautiful and very practical housing, hospitals and other major living environments. Almost every time he’s commissioned in a competitive tender they ask for rough drawings of the concept, to be approved by the board. Almost every time his team don’t get the job but another does, part of his designs end up being built by the other firm. John has hundreds of examples where this has happened. From ways to build structural walls, to means to construct floors that allow water to pass under, to roofs that let light through, John’s inventions are legendary. But most of these concepts have been stolen by rival architects and builders with no compensation for John’s team. This simply has to stop – who-ever invents the concept deserves recognition and some compensation/reward for their inventiveness. Or you don’t use their idea, simples.

Anne is a very well-known Public Relations expert who’s run her own very successful business for decades. Anne hates doing pitches, although they are an integral part of the business of PR. People want to know how you would handle their delicate issue, who’ll work on it and how much it would cost. Fair enough. Except the problem is, whenever someone bright like Anne does a pitch, a percentage of the ideas, perhaps half, perhaps even more of the ideas, get taken by the company and given to either their internal team to execute, or the rival PR firm who happens to win the business. Worse, more often than not, the PR firm who ends up with the work has an insider in on the case, either a relative or some other dodgy arrangement. Sometimes these ideas save whole companies from going right down the gurgler. They have real value, often worth millions of dollars to the company. Anne’s message is simple – if it’s not your idea, don’t take it. Pay a reasonable sum for an idea if you want it, or do not use it. Anything else is pure theft and theft must be stopped.

Dorothy works for a prestigious garden design firm who do up-market landscape designs for City Botanic Gardens, Tourism locations, major companies and government departments and some very wealthy families. These commissions are sometimes done as a competitive tender arrangement, where more than one design team is asked how they would propose to do the project. Now the number of plant varieties is millions. The way you might configure them in a design matrix is in the billions. But nevertheless, the number of times that a prospective client has turned around and had their people directly copy a design submitted in a competitive pitch is staggering, And almost always they say the same thing ‘but you can’t patent a garden design, it’s just an idea, so what your problem, we found someone cheaper to do it'. Just because something isn’t patentable does not mean the inventor shouldn’t be paid for their idea.

Christina has been at the forefront of cyber security and designing intricate ways to prevent data theft for some years now. Her firm is regularly asked to submit tenders for large companies IT operations. Even though she is very well known, they still want to know what you would be doing to ensure the firm did not breach data security requirements imposed by the government, or by big corporate clients etc. Christina has heaps of examples where the client asking for the pitch has used part of her team’s planned approach, whether it’s the combination of apps and computer language, or the steps and means the data is stored or where on which ‘cloud’ critical elements end up within ‘mirrored’ environments etc. Because she has had to sign confidentiality agreements to be allowed to pitch, means the client will often present that document as ‘proof’ that Christina’s firm do not own their own ideas. And they often think they are clever stealing ideas as they think the programs and processes they’ve copied are ‘hidden’ within their system - dumb madness when it’s digital pathways… Which is why IT firms are one of the most regularly stolen from of all Ideas Union member types. Has to stop.

Paul has a unique means to teach senior management about sexual harassment and how not to do it. How to make sure everyone on the senior team is well-behaved and follows acceptable social behavioural norms. His approach involves a very simple but very successful technique which we can’t tell you about. But we can tell you about its outcomes. Men stop hitting on women, women stop hitting on men - way less sexual tension. Everyone is happier. Paul took his proven system to a major retail group. They loved the idea and booked him to start on their head office team in a few weeks. Curious as to what was taking the time between his initial invoice and their confirming the date, Paul was told by the head of HR who’s said they’d buy the program, that he was too expensive at his per-person rate, and they’d found another company to do the same thing. Pail reminded the head of HR that he was an Ideas Union member (this was during our preliminary ‘beta’ testing phase) and after she had checked with their legal team, they paid Paul for his pitch, paid him for using his concept and paid him to run the program through all of their management, which ended up being hundreds more people than he had originally expected. Paul is tens of thousands better off and a very happy camper.