Protecting your Intellectual Property (IP) a.k.a No FREE Consulting

Q: What is the ultimate goal of companies?
A: Companies want to make money! Plain and simple.

And, in the economic downturn, they need to innovate to remain competitive. In other words, they need fresh ideas. Most of them don't need super qualified labor at this point in time since it would cost them too much. But, they are in dire need of ideas. Once they have a brilliant idea, they have or will find some engineer with a recent PhD (and those are a dime a dozen nowadays!) to execute the idea.

Some companies contacted me recently and introduced themselves in the following way (adapted):

"Good Morning Dr. Casse. We know that you're a renown expert in the field X. We would like to go in the direction X+DX and would like to have your opinion on it. How would you go about it? BTW, we had some problem with X+D3X for the past 6 months. Maybe you could offer us some insights into solving those problems? Since you have expertise in Y also, we'd like to know the challenges in doing Y+DX? etc...

We may have some openings coming up for somebody who's very talented and qualified as you. But for now, we would appreciate if you could share your expertise with us!"

Do they think that I'm dumb?:)

I was talking with my friend Dr. M. Azize from MIT and colleague R. Tavlykaev (independent consultant) who also shared how some companies have become very aggressive, shameless and unethical to gain a competitive edge.

Let's face it, this is a form of *FREE* consulting. Providing companies some form of clues will make them earn a lot of money and pointing them in the right direction will also enable them to save millions of dollars in doing some redundant trial and error. What's in for the *free* consultant? Nothing. These companies will patent ideas, make million dollars of profit and that's the end of it.

I will advise *freely* universities, opensource communities and non-profit organizations on a limited scope. But I'm not into free consulting for greedy companies who will give nothing in return. And neither should YOU because you have nothing to gain. There is no job prospect either: The companies use it as a bait to lure you. So, these companies, in general, will not contact professors directly (since professors are not that dumb!), but will instead target postdocs and research scientists to do the dirty work for them.

The moral of the story is to protect your intellectual property (IP) and be aware of the dirty game that some companies are playing.