Hi guys.

I'm seeking advice regarding ethics. I own half of a company that's mainly about web-design, but offers a very wide array of services, such as brand design, mobile and web-app development. I'm the creative director.

Now here's what happens. We're flooded with work. Our engineers constantly have their hands full. In the meantime I occasionally have ideas for projects that I feel have a lot of potential but due to the workload are never followed through. I'm talking about things like a cool web service that we could pitch to a bunch of companies, or a niche-directed software that could be sold on an app-store, things like that. My company does 99% client-requested work, and although we sometimes talk about building some products, it never happened.

So sometimes I mention ideas internally, people get hyped about them, but we never go through simply because there's no time/resources.

I currently have an idea for an app. This isn't the kind of thing my company does normally although we have the competence to build it. I know I can't count on the company to build it so I'm thinking of persuing it as a personal project, teaming up with an outside developer.

This adds up to a dilemma: being the creative director of my own company, does ethic oblige me to persue my ideas as the company's ideas? Is this making competition against my own company? What do you think?