launch and have participants sign the agreement before getting their ideas. If you are capturing ideas from the public via an on-line tool, this disclaimer is normally an on-line agreement the user accepts by clicking a clearly labelled button acknowledging that acceptance.

Author: Jeffrey Baumgartner is the founder of the jpb.com companies, co-founder of the Brussels Imagination Club, author of The Way of the Innovation Master and editor of the popular Report 103 newsletter. He speaks and writes regularly on creativity and innovation. He will be speaking at 4th SA Innovation Summit 2011.

Disclaimers are used by nearly every organisation running an open innovation initiative. The downside to them is that some people may be reluctant to share their incredible ideas with you only to let you profit from them. So your initiative will need some kind of reward system. But we will get back to that in a moment. You may also run into the scenario that a patented concept is shared with you. In this case, the patent owner is almost certainly not going to grant you free rights to exploit her idea – that’s why she patented it. In such a scenario, you will have to license from her the right to use the idea. Incidentally, intellectual property is not normally an issue with internal innovation. The employment contracts you have with your employees should make it clear than anything developed on company time is company property. If this is not the case, or you have no employment contract, you need to do something about this immediately!

Rewards You customers, of course, will always be happy to share with you ideas about how to make your product better – at least in their minds – and will generally share those ideas with no expectation of reward, beyond a better product. But such ideas are inevitably incremental improvements on existing products and not breakthrough innovations that will propel your company into the international limelight and make you and your shareholders filthy rich. For the latter sort of ideas, you need to offer some kind of compensation or reward for ideas and their development.