Dear Mahar Ali,

It depends of the stage of your work. For the initial PhD proposal there are low chances that they have any valuable things except the outlining the possibly promising field of research. For the next stages of your research I would advise to write short working papers and put them in ssrn.com and researchgate.net before any public presentation. By this way you can always claim your scientific priority as these platforms indicate the exact dates of paper uploading. It is easy to change the initial variants of such working papers into enhanced variants after the discussion and feedback.

Success!

Igor Gurkov

Is there a possibility of "stealing of idea" as a a result of presenting PHD proposal in PHD colloquium ?

Yes there is a possibility as mentioned above.  However, finding the advantages of presenting PhD proposal in colloquium are exceeding the risk that your idea is being stolen.  Some advantages include:

In order to minimize the above possibility that your research idea risked being stolen, you can perform the following:

Thanks Han Ping Fung for a comprehensive response. I hope and wish others to respond to this important issue.

I would say this risk would be stronger in a STEM field, where discoveries can be published only once. In mangement sciences, there will likely be differences in number and type of organisations studied, used theoretical framework, and used research methodology. So idea theft might reduce newness, but usually cannot eliminate it. 

I would agree that discussion about your research, for instance through PhD collocia is far more important than the risk of idea theft. 

Dear Mahar Ali,

It depends of the stage of your work. For the initial PhD proposal there are low chances that they have any valuable things except the outlining the possibly promising field of research. For the next stages of your research I would advise to write short working papers and put them in ssrn.com and researchgate.net before any public presentation. By this way you can always claim your scientific priority as these platforms indicate the exact dates of paper uploading. It is easy to change the initial variants of such working papers into enhanced variants after the discussion and feedback.

Success!

Igor Gurkov

In my doctoral program, I was able to choose my committee members *within certain guidelines).  I made sure to choose committee members I trusted.  

I myself value Han's representation of the situation (thank you, very constructive Han).

Usually in a 12 minutes presentation (PhD colloquiums for PhD candidates) for any person, you really give pointers which are not enough to "steal" an idea! In case, one fears such a situation, you construct your presentation carefully around one aspect which you seek more advise from expert audiences. Anyway, I was never in a situation where I see some just waiting to steal ideas from such professional meetings. Usually every presenter is proud of his/her work.

" It is not a secret that writing a paper takes less time than completing PHD."

I would like to recommend not to wait until your PhD is completed before publishing your first paper. I'm a PhD student myself and I wouldn't present 'anything I'm not planning to submit for publication within the next three month.

I am thankful to Renee Wever,Imam Salehudin,Hussin Jose Hejase and Igor Gurkov for their valuable feedback. What if we convert our research proposal to conceptual paper.Will it be a good move?

Hi, Mazhar.

That 's exactly what my supervisor advised me to do. Some fields of science are less accommodating to conceptual papers, though. You should also aim for journals that accepted such papers.

Dear Mazhar and Imam,

Of course, you should follow you supervisors' recommendations, But to make a conceptual paper at the beginning of your Ph.D. journey is the worst thing to do. At the very best,  you  will be able to make a good overview of the literature. The real conceptual  paper appears (or does not) at the very end of Ph.D. research, when you see the weaknesses of the exiting concepts and have proven the better way to understand the phenomenon.

Al the bests,

Igor Gurkov 

Thanks Igor Gurkov for another valuable contribution.

Thank you for the comment, Prof. Gurkov.

While I do agree with your point that presenting half baked ideas as conceptual papers are bad, I must respectfully disagree that fully baked ideas can only be obtained (or not) at the end of our PhD. Especially if we can break down the research question into smaller pieces that can be baked separately or subsequently. This may depend on how we prefer to publish our research. For me, incremental publications along different stages and aspects of my study seems preferable than publishing my entire PhD in a single paper at the very end.

Best regards,

Imam

I don't think so, PhD proposal is just about an idea, no one can steal your idea. It takes time to implement things, and especially in management and social sciences, there can be many kinds of study gaps like contextual gap, methodological, etc. But it is better to give a general idea about your research in the proposal defense. My PhD proposal was just about 3-4 pages and it just provided a basic framework and proposed techniques to solve a problem.

Absolutely possible.

Article Is Your Idea Safe?

Good sharing Claire of the article.

Following.

I think yes. One of my friend had faced that. His idea, methodology was stolen and then published by someone.