Recently, our consultants were required to sign a proprietary agreement in which common shared knowledge that is researched and developed in-house, is to be acknowledged.
We were unable to prevent incidents where thought-out services were used in public without proper acknowledgment to us.
SAMARATA’s unique selling point is its knowledge where we create, devise, research and share knowledge. The minimum askance by the management team is that we get fair recognition for work and time put in and we do not mind sharing these efforts.
I met engineers from multi-national companies who held joint patents with the companies that they work for as researchers. I believe we, too must have these agreements in place so as to avoid any misunderstanding or seed any form of discontent among the members.
An agreement to share knowledge:
1. Acknowledging that it may be a team effort and not everything potentially is based on one person. However, if it is a single person’s research using the Firm’s or Organisation’s time, then it should be reflected. In a hybrid office scenario and working from home, it is hard to distinguish when one thought about an idea and lend credence that it was done during working hours. To me, honesty and the ability to share, go a long way to show how much care for an organisation by a person working for his/her career.
2. It is not meant as a punishment but as a sense of pride. When you share your findings, you are proud to be associated with your mates. You are not the lone wolf. In good times and in bad times, when you run out of ideas, other people in the team can spur you on with newer and better ideas as people have the confidence in the organisational structure and behaviour to provide a lab for churning out these ideas.
3. Avoid costly litigations. Should a consultant or someone choose to work for self-gain or a direct competitor with the new idea, the legal option may be one of the ways to recoup potential losses. It is ugly and downright unfair to claim who has the absolute right to nifty thoughts. There should be a win-win strategy here.
We need our clients to work with us, on developing new ideas. We are most happy to come into an agreement that these ideas shall be jointly developed and we keep each other in the loop. In the past, we have been asked to work on a particular brand or client and never to work for another company that may be a competitor. We have been asked to offer exclusive contracts for it.
My stand is that like many top-notch professional firms is that we don’t place the same team in the same industry as our client. I will allocate Team A for one client and Team B for another and ensure that whatever trade secrets will not be shared unless like our agreement, it is publicly available or over time the protection for the information had lapsed and become available in public.
We have situations where our clients’ senior partner or management left the company to set up a competitive business. Even though they are not our clients, they may use similar strategies in the market, such as omnichannel to introduce their products faster during startups.
In the end, the world is your oyster. Even if the environment is very competitive and Red Ocean, it is up to your own methodology, thinking, management team and advisors to come up with bright ideas that few will ever think of and take risks.
Now that 1/3 of the year has passed by quickly, I hope you will meet with every success in the months to come.
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