You'll need a lawyer to define what these 'techniques' are and how far they fall into intellectual property category. If, in the middle of a project, you sudde

You'll need a lawyer to define what these 'techniques' are and how far they fall into intellectual property category. If, in the middle of a project, you suddenly change brace style in your code? Nobody will care. If you invent something like map-reduce? You can be sure the customer will own that invention. There's a huge spectrum here. Lawyer up.