The issue here seems more cultural than technical - it seems non-tech firms are vastly more paranoid about data sharing or leakage, despite usually having less valuable data. The amount of effort put into anti-exfiltration measures in finance is staggering compared to what existed at Google, and it kills productivity to an enormous degree.
This seems to go hand in hand with a much greater obsession over IP. I've seen people actually threaten to start legal fights over whiteboard diagrams of little to no meaning at all. My guess is that outside the tech industry, new ideas are relatively rare so even very simple ideas feel incredibly valuable. This gets generalised to anything employees produce and is why there's no culture of open source development in most traditional industries.
Not really no. I'd guess most tech firms have far more ideas than they can ever execute on. Ideas are cheap. Implementations are expensive.
See how all the big firms file gazillions of patents but actual patent infringement suits between them are quite rare. Patents are seen as a defensive posture: everyone knows everyone violates a million patents so by and large, mutually assured destruction is avoided. In a world where ideas were rare you'd see patents be treated as much more valuable.
Put it this way: if all our engineering design documents and presentations leaked, our competitors would get less value from their contents than they would have to spend on the reading.
This seems to go hand in hand with a much greater obsession over IP. I've seen people actually threaten to start legal fights over whiteboard diagrams of little to no meaning at all. My guess is that outside the tech industry, new ideas are relatively rare so even very simple ideas feel incredibly valuable. This gets generalised to anything employees produce and is why there's no culture of open source development in most traditional industries.