That is actually a good question about something that is a real issue:
Maurice comes up with an idea, gets talks to a manufacturer to get an idea of how much it’ll cost to get them made. Manufacturer quotes a price based on Maurice’s specs. Maurice launches Kickstarter, meantime, someone scoops up the specs. By the time Maurice gets enough money to start manufacturing, someone else is already up and running, and since the middlemen have been cut out, and maybe whoever is doing it is cutting a few corners and not insisting on fair labour, the cost is way, way cheaper, especially since they’re not trying to position themselves as a luxury brand. And Maurice ends up selling his stuff cut-rate on random websites, just to not be stuck with a storage unit full of now mostly worthless stock.
Industrial espionage > State espionage, any six days of the week. And not everyone is like PepsiCo, simply handing the secret recipe back to Coke and helping prosecute the thief.
