Learn About Your Options
What
Innovation Options function just like their financial options counterparts: they delay investment decisions until you know more about the market, hedging against risk in highly uncertain environments.
How
It starts with your idea, around which we form an independent LLC that your firm owns wholly, including all intellectual property. We then underwrite an option to operate the LLC for fixed period of time and test that idea against market reality. At expiration, you review the real-world data and decide if the results justify exercising the option to take back what’s yours and scale your idea. Or pivot to another. Or persevere. Or pass, and move on to another idea. It’s your idea, and your option. You own it, you decide. We just empower you to base your decision on learned knowledge and not simply assumptions.
Why
Corporate innovation fails 97% of the time because their governance and accounting systems are not geared towards operating with new opportunities that are too small to compete with their current businesses. This innovator’s dilemma is inescapable for even the very best firms; it is built into the system itself. But we succeed because our entire business model is built on producing accurate results as fast as possible, independent of the value of any one idea. What brings us together is the innovation option model that gives corporations the ultimate control and ownership they need while giving us the freedom to innovate outside of traditional corporate governance structures.
Where
Our firm manages your option outside of your walls. You can observe and get regular reports, but the only decision you make is whether or not to exercise the option. This leaves your idea to be tested fully against reality, without the distorting influence of corporate politics. This independence is critical so that we can get you the most accurate answer in the fastest possible time. Don’t take it personally, but more than twenty years of corporate consulting has proved that it simply isn’t possible for your firm to do this job as well as we can. It’s just not in your DNA. But it’s in ours, because it’s all we do.
When
Innovation Options can be used to explore the value of any idea, but are best suited to disruptive opportunities that are substantially outside its core competencies or threaten its existing businesses. Mostly they are used whenever firms have more ideas than they have resources to explore. So if you have ideas that are not being tested because you think you can’t, then let us write an option for them so that you can be sure you aren’t missing The Next Big Thing because you didn’t think you had the time or money to pursue it. We do.
Who
The Innovation Options model was created by David Binetti, our founder. Dave is a six-time entrepreneur with exits to Cisco, Pinterest, and even the US Government. One of the pioneers of the Lean Startup movement, he consulted to Fortune 500 companies for nearly 20 years on how to build, measure, and learn faster. It was in addressing the un-sexy yet essential needs of effective governance models for corporate finance that led him to the breakthrough innovation options approach that is at the center of our services.