I would say that there's no benefit to disclosing it to your employer based on your explanation. Patents are for protecting the inventor while time and money is

I would say that there's no benefit to disclosing it to your employer based on your explanation. Patents are for protecting the inventor while time and money is invested in seeing an invention through to market. If your employer is the ideal producer for your concept and you want to limit their competition, then I suppose you could. But if you wanted to change jobs or were laid off, etc you would theoretically lose a bargaining chip and would have made any potential employer worse off by limiting their ability to also implement your idea. If it's something that you want to protect for your own use, you could put basic substance of the patent application in a YouTube video or something and release it as public domain. (IANAL so YouTube may be ill-advised) Also, life is unpredictable and you can sell/license a patented idea. Having more safety nets is better than less.