Here's how Mike Dreese, CEO of music retailer Newbury Comics, came to realize that the sales information he shared with his industry was putting his company at a disadvantage. It does classified work for the departments of Energy and Defense, and frequently works with private-sector companies and occasionally even with foreign governments. It has an elaborate system of Web sites meant to encourage information sharing both internally and externally.
People use our external Web site to solicit partnerships from industry.
They want to put up enough information so that companies that sell solar-power systems, for example, or even foreign governments that want to deliver power to remote regions of their countries, might want to establish relationships with them. But we always have patent agents review the information before it's published. The agents determine whether we're actually giving away intellectual property by describing in too much detail a process that we have invented, and they then adjust the content accordingly. We don't want a competitor or a foreign government to get enough information that they could file the patent first. We certainly have issues relative to classified information, since the bulk of our work is related to nuclear weapons.