By day, John Lyon works at the University of Nevada. In the evenings, as “TechGuy”, he works for a Calgary-based software company called Cambrian House, putting in an average of an hour a night. His work for Cambrian is rather different from his day job: he is only rewarded if Cambrian likes what he does.

Thus far, Cambrian has taken on one of his ideas, Jumblelunch, a networking programme that helps business club members organise lunches. The company aims to commercialise and market the application and, if it succeeds, will pay Mr Lyon according to the “royalty points” it has already assigned to him for the idea.