Commercial company wants me to list all prior "inventions", give up everything not listed
I work at an R&amp;D company that has a pretty similar clause in its contract, and in fact most R&amp;D companies will.  

The core reason is that things change quickly in R&amp;D, so an area that the company has no interest in today may be a big part of their in business in 5-10 years.  Moreover, employees like you are likely to be the ones who create new business areas like that, and if they don't put in a very broad clause, there's nothing to stop you from taking work you've done at the company to a competitor or spinning off your own company (see, for example the fights going on over self-driving tech).

So, what should you do?  Well, it really depends on the reason for your objection.


If you've got moral objections to IP being controlled by companies, don't work in commercial R&amp;D.
If you want to keep contributing to existing free and open software projects, put that down as a general reservation in the "prior inventions" section. Most reasonable R&amp;D organizations will accept that in some form (though it may take a bit of back and forth on the wording), since for most companies that's never going to be their competition.
If you want to be able to pursue new side projects: embrace the clause! Don't think of it as "the company wants to steal my ideas" but instead as "the company might want to pay me to do my side projects".  In a healthy R&amp;D organization, what you do with a potentially commercially interesting side project is essentially give them "right of first refusal" -- and if they don't want to support it, then it's yours.


Now, unhealthy organizations are a whole different story, of course, but there's lots of better reasons you wouldn't want to work for one of them in any case.



Adding in a clarifying note based on the comments:

While we can't know for sure without seeing the full statement, what has been shared, however, doesn't actually say the company is claiming all prior works. Instead, it appears to follow the usual practice of clarifying which IP the company agrees cannot be claimed, due to their origins in prior works. Prior works not listed, if they come into dispute, just have to have their origin established in other ways (e.g., scientific publication, date-stamps in metadata).