Comment by cyphar

It depends on the country. In some countries, work related to your job but done outside work (or work using company resources like a company laptop -- I believe in California this is also the case) might possibly be owned by your employer (if your work contract says so). For instance if you work on databases and in your free time you developed a really awesome database from scratch, that might be owned by your employer because of the training and learning resources your employer provided (I think this is the reasoning -- but personally I find it quite abhorrent).

But I assumed that GP was talking about wanting to contribute something they did on work time, not on their own time.