There's a difference in competition and compensation between a craftsman who constructs products and an inventor who generates ideas. The problem is that the wo

There's a difference in competition and compensation between a craftsman who constructs products and an inventor who generates ideas. The problem is that the world is not black and white, there's a little of each in every career, and obviously companies want the best of both. If you were a carpenter who worked in an old-time furniture store, turning chair legs on a duplicating lathe at work and turning toy spinning tops on a treadle lathe at home, there's no harm to your employer if you use some related skills at home. If you're not making parts that match their requirements, those parts are of no value to them. The company might as well pay you per unit, rather than hourly or as a salary. If you worked at a think tank or research institution, your job might be to generate one particularly brilliant concept that was by itself worth your annual salary. You might spend your days testing ideas and improving your understanding of the problem domain while your subconscious mulls over everything at night. A musician is an interesting career in context - are they paid to move samples around in Pro Tools or think about and try a huge variety of riffs until they find the next Top 40 sound? If you had a great idea in your sleep, it was probably because you've taken a paycheck for the last 6 months at work generating no useful output, the only thing you built was the thought patterns in your brain. The company wants to own your brain, the thought patterns therein, and everything you think of. Technology and automation is making ideas more scalable all the time, the industrial era where workers were paid to pull a lever repeatedly is in the past. I think we're only seeing the beginning of non-competes.