After skipping a week for a business trip, we’re back with the Innovation Breakfast in Waltham.  A small group discussion on local innovation, entrepreneurship and startups, we’ve had a different group almost every week.   And the conversations and connections have been fascinating.  This week was no exception.  We even had a brand new guest, from San Francisco, beating our previous long distance guest’s trip (from Vermont.)

Our latest entrepreneur friend is in the medical field and was looking at connecting with other medical/life sciences folks.  (Now he wants to find a group like ours in San Francisco!  Yeah, we made a new friend.)

After the usual round of introductions, talk turned to how to connect with others at event.  We also discussed the serendipitous meetings, a specialty of ours!  Put enough people in the room, and allow them to connect and “bingo” magic happens.

From there things wended their way into a conversation about protecting your entrepreneurial intellectual property.  If you are bootstrapping your start up, it is quite likely you are working days for someone else and doing your own venture at night — see our Innovation Nights site.  How do you avoid having your employer own what you are creating?  (Read up on the Mattel/Bratz battle, where Mattel claims to own Bratz because the founder of Bratz was working for Mattel at the time of product conception.)