>> Your physicist friend ... should have evaluated whether it was a real problem ... I do not have the facts around this, however knowing him, I would guess th

>> Your physicist friend ... should have evaluated whether it was a real problem ... I do not have the facts around this, however knowing him, I would guess that it was a real problem. >> ... and the company ignored his solution, then take the solution to market and become a competitor. As you know, this is not so straightforward in practice: * Not everyone is a entrepreneur, for whatever reason that is. * Not everyone has a brand to be able to raise money. * It may not be wise for investors to fund a project completing with an established/powerful mid-size company that owns a wide range in that space. * Some projects may require large investments and teams especially when the other side is a big company. * The big companies deploy all kind of schemes if they see a threat. * One of the threats is the existing intellectual property rights in that space that the company would already have. * As the invention was already made when the person was employed at the company, the invention as such likely already belongs to the company (as per typical employment agreements that most do not care to read), and this already forms a threat falling in the above bullet point. * The corporate politics would start at the newly started company itself becoming an internal threat. * And so on. Hopefully you do not see all above as unreal, a fake problem. :-) Not to say there aren't successes -- We hear about those so often. [Edit:] Well, someone cited a story like that right here in this thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39500316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39500316