You go to a restaurant and order apple pie. It’s the best apple pie you’ve ever eaten. You want the recipe. You can either ask for it or reverse engineer it. So far so good. But what if you wanted to make an apple pie that was even better? Knowing the recipe will only take you so far. What would really help is knowing what didn’t work. You won’t have to experiment in the kitchen wasting time and resources. You now have a head start. Welcome to the value of negative trade secrets, the critical knowledge of what doesn’t work.

What if the apple pie you were enjoying was from your own restaurant, but your cook, taking with her all her knowledge of what doesn’t work, is hired by your competitor? If she uses your recipe and nothing more, she has taken your trade secret and you could sue her. But if she uses those negative trade secrets of what doesn’t work to make a better apple pie, what are you to do? Now she’s created a different recipe. How are you to prove that her new, better recipe is in fact your bastard offspring?