I'm a developer who has developed an idea for my current workplace that I'd like to take a lot further and take to market.
The company I work for has no interest or legal way to sell software (we've discussed this before) and I believe it to be in their best interest if I were to further develop the product. I would most certainly be sharing any future updates/revisioning with them at no charge.
Before I take the step of approaching any sort of legal advice I'd like to approach the CIO of my employer candidly and discuss this as well as find out their appetite for the idea.
My intention is to write a full business analysis of my proposal so the CIO would have a clear understanding of the features that I wish to develop. If they decided that these features are more worthwhile of an internal effort I would instead focus on that and not pursue it as an outside interest, as would be their right and expectation from me as my employer.
How should I begin this discussion and is there anything I should be prepared to answer? Is it better left alone entirely given potential legal pitfalls I'm not yet aware of? Finally, ethically is this a bad idea even though through my biased perspective I can see advantages for my employer as well?