Member-only story
People Want Your Ideas (but They Don’t Want to Pay for them)
Calling out those that take the creativity but leave the business
Without a great idea in the first place you wouldn’t have Harry Potter. Star Wars. Facebook. The internet. Podcasting. Serial.
Ideas start everything.
But people don’t want to pay for ideas. They think they should be cheap. Free, preferably.
And I’ve had enough of it.
If you’re going to have a hit (be it a film, music track, record sales growth strategy tweak or even just a “oh, that’s a nice idea!” podcast word-of-mouth approval amongst your peers)… you need to pay the person who came up with it. Fairly.
Credit Where It’s Not Due
I spent the first 20 years of my career working in huge media organisations where ripping off employee’s ideas was just par for the course.
It was even in your contract. Anything you came up with — a format, a brand name, a strategy, a new piece of tech — belonged to the company, not you. And the company could do whatever they wanted with it. Forever.
But you signed and just tried not to worry about it because, y’know, you were SO LUCKY (and didn't they just love to remind you of it) to…
