Introduction

The recent global focus on the importance of innovation has once again placed corporate venture capital (CVC) in the spotlight. With a burst of new programs and the recommitment of long-time players, CVC is certainly back but with significant differences than in its earlier incarnations. With the resurgence of CVC, an old debate once again arises: should programs pursue the familiar ROI metric of financial returns, or should strategic measures be placed at the forefront of priorities Simply chasing financial returns in concert with the boys from Sand Hill Road has always been seen by some particularly securities analysts, whose capital asset pricing models dont handle private equity risk terribly well as a somewhat dubious enterprise. But measuring success based on ROI does have its charms, chief among them that making money is never bad, and a simple metric provides a convenient place to hang the ol compensation hat. While useful to some degree, ROI has some major drawbacks. It says nothing about how much a deal may (or may not) contribute to the parents strategic goals. It is a binary, long-cycle measure which provides little in the way of in-game feedback particularly problematic in a management culture which thrives on well-granulated metrics served up every quarter. Since strategic value is orthogonal to financial return1, it distorts the pursuit of strategic gains. Perhaps most importantly, it robs CVC managers of the opportunity to clearly demonstrate what they do for internal stakeholders, and thereby earn their rightful place as high-value partners. Most CVC managers agree that delivering strategic value back to the enterprise is more important than chasing ROI, but given the mantra if it cant be measured it doesnt exist, rare is the firm that can resist it. Like the drunk who looks for his lost car keys under the streetlight, its not that its where they really expect to find value; its just where they can shed some light. And indeed the problem of effectively defining and tracking the actual strategic elements of a strategic investment is a thorny one. Consider the following analogy: Youre responsible for feeding 8 kids. Theyre fruitarians2 each likes only certain kinds of fruit, and each has a particular order of preference; one likes apples, bananas, and pears, in that order and another likes oranges, strawberries, and bananas. Theyre going to pay for the fruit with their allowance, and because some of them are cheap and not very discerning, while others are more profligate and extremely picky, each has a different price/quality preference which must be taken into account.

Benefits of Partnering with Early Stage Firms

Relevant new capabilities are being discovered internationally at a rate much faster than that of the existing R&D organization Disproportionate revenue potential relative to investment; because firms only fund a small percentage of development CapEx, early-stage partnerships have greater ROI for corporate partners than internal R&D Early-Stage companies are often quicker and more agile than corporate R&D departments, and generally face less headwind in responding to changing conditions External equity investment is a balance sheet activity; partners development expense does not affect firms P&L Early/field-of-use exclusive access to portfolio companys proprietary technology Finely-targeted technologies are sourced for specific products and services where gaps or opportunities (a/k/a gapportunities) have been identified Early-Stage companies produce the majority of disruptive technologies; these can provide powerful marketplace differentiators and drive returns very far in excess of normative hurdle rates Firm gets an early window on new technologies early signals of market and technology shifts and can influence the application of those technologies in its field-of-use Small companies identify and respond to market opportunities in a fraction of the corporation commercialization cycle, yielding powerful time-to-market gains Ability to target technologies outside of an annual R&D budgeting cycle, allowing for immediate development

At best some would argue that pursuing standard ROI inevitably overpowers a strategic focus, and that the relationship is therefore inverse rather than merely unrelated. RIP Steve Jobs

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Off you go to the supermarket. When you get there you find that although they do, indeed, have lots of fruit, they will only sell it to you in baskets. To make matters even more difficult, each basket contains a different assortment of fruit, with different pieces having different levels of quality. Each has a different price, and there are hundreds of baskets. Your kids pooled allowance allows you to buy between 4 and 8 deals (uhbaskets of fruit), depending on the assortment you choose. Sowhats the right mix? Replace kids with technology (or business) areas, kinds of fruit with strategic drivers, and baskets with deals, and youve got a reasonable approximation of what you have to contend with to do strategic investment rationally. But it actually gets a little worse. While kids will tell you in no uncertain terms what they will and will not eat, internal stakeholders technologists, product developers, marketers, etc. arent necessarily all that good at articulating whats missing from products & services. Not only is it difficult for them to know what they dont know3, but they often dont have enough exposure to the innovation ecosystem to see what may be possible. Consequently, the CVC manager has to start by figuring out the appetites of dozens if not hundreds of internal stakeholders, each of whom has a different potential to affect firm finances, and a different potential to impact on non-financial strategic goals. Seems like an intractable problem, doesnt it? Not anymore. TechBriefsm
The TechBrief is a structured document which is built in close concert with internal stakeholders as we take a deep dive into a technology or business area. Working together engages them from the outset in identifying and prioritizing innovation opportunities what we call gapportunities and allows us to bring beginners mind to the process. The TechBrief is the starting point for collecting data in building an Innovation Capital program, but it has tremendous stand-alone value as a thorough, wellstructured snapshot of a particular facet of the clients business. The TechBrief looks at many facets of the innovation potential including: Inclusions/Exclusions: Which technologies are being sought and which technologies are peripheral but not included in the present search? Where do these technologies overlap/diverge? Description of problems that new technology should address What are the relevant trends in the field is there a hot topic that might be exploited in concert with an external innovator? What recent advances and events in this area make it ripe for gaining competitive advantage, etc. Which client-held technologies are complementary to potential external innovations What is the current view of internal stakeholders, and how might we validate (or calibrate) those views in light of external innovation? Would a potential innovation best be developed by an early stage technology, or a more mature company, or in in-house research? What kinds of partnerships would best fit relative to the internal state of play? Geo-political factors: changes in resource availability, environmental regulations; cleaner and greener options The TechBrief is immensely valuable for both Synchrony and for the client. Initial strategic variables and parameters are defined, and the internal stakeholders are immediately engaged in a shared process which quickly identifies gapportunities and their potential to impact on enterprise priorities.

The Innovation Capitalsm System

This paper describes a structured, analytic, empirical framework by which large, established corporations can identify, assess, compare, value, and track opportunities to invest in early-stage firms and their success in meeting strategic criteria. It establishes an approach dubbed Innovation Capital by which a large firm can transform the strategic investment/partnering activity from a subjective, difficult-to-describe and often opportunistic activity into a repeatable, scalable, and widely-accepted mechanism for acquiring competitive-advantage conferring capabilities.

The Rumsfeldian unknown unknowns

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70/30 Rule of Innovation Capital Partnering

Innovation is, by its very nature, about surprises. In the parlance of technology, we call such surprises disruptions. One of the properties of a disruption is that it has the potential to produce either a step-function in an existing strategic variable, or introduce a new one altogether. As no system can hope to fully anticipate a dislocation of this type, a fail-safe is required. In the Innovation Capital system, the golden swans serve as this fail-safe. This raises an interesting question what proportion of useful opportunities should we expect to make sense to the Innovation Capital system, and what proportion should hit as Golden Swans? Since its impossible to predict disruptions, either in quantity or quality, we must rely on other considerations to set a threshold. We start by asking ourselves how much tolerance a large enterprise has for responding to out-of-left-field opportunities, on the one hand, vs. the advantages of calibrating external partnering to the overall appetite for innovation, on the other. We recognize that normalizing process is extremely important, and that a holistic, systematic approach is highly valuable. Finally, we consider the utility of the system as a feedback mechanism for the strategic variables themselves. In technical terms, we want to set a threshold above which we can say with a large degree of certainty that the market is signaling that the firm isnt being ambitious enough in its efforts to incorporate new technologies. Taking all of this into account, we peg that split at 70/30 as an initial starting value. Over time, depending on market conditions and client appetite for risk/reward, that threshold can be moved to wherever makes sense.

The Innovation Capital system establishes an empirically-driven, objective, and sustainable method for: Discovering and ranking strategic priorities Determining which technology and business areas within the firm have the most potential to contribute to advancing those priorities, and which specific gaps and/or opportunities (gapportunities) in those areas have can benefit most from innovation Concisely articulating potential strategic gains, and screening dealflow relative to those gains Establishing specific value-creation thresholds for deals/partnerships and tracking performance over time Simply and succinctly reporting to senior management, and articulating the value created by strategic investments The Innovation Capital system is built around a customizable framework which allows a wide range of disparate innovation opportunities to be compared to one another. Financial variables (i.e. increased revenue, improved margins, cost savings); Key Performance Indicators (i.e. efficiency increase, time-to-market decrease, establishment of a competitive barrier, product differentiators); and difficult-to-measure intangible benefits (technological influence, learnings, know-how, market-signaling) are reduced to a single, easy-to-understand two-part expression. This expression establishes a common language for evaluating opportunities, no matter how different they may be from one another, and serves as the basis for a highly efficient, stream-lined process of determining which deals warrant deeper exploration. It presents data in an easy, visually-compelling way, and allows managers a compelling means of calibrating the tradeoff between traditional financial measures and strategic gains. Using the Innovation Capital system, Synchrony collects data about a firms strategic needs, technology and/or business gaps, and inflection points for innovation at multiple levels. This raw information has great utility (even above and beyond its use for targeting strategic investments), but is very difficult to frame analytically. In addition, the answers are subjective and observer biased. The Innovation Capital system takes the raw data and uses proprietary algorithms to transform the inherently disparate measures into a single, easy-to-understand expression which captures the two most important components of a strategic investment: its potential to generate operating profits, and its ability satisfy strategic objectives. In the process, it can also uncover the potential market value of solutions. The resulting measure is called Total Innovation Capital Returns or TiCR. The two components are financial return on investment (fROI) and strategic return on investment (sROI). The simplified expression is as follows:

TiCR = fROI & sROI

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Because the expression contains two components, it can be plotted on an x/y scatter chart (Figure 1). CVC managers can use this chart to easily visualize the mix of strategic and financial return in any deal or collection of deals. The system also provides an elegant method for capturing the strategic significance of each potential improvement and projecting the amount of value that improvement might yield. Lastly, it provides a means of prioritizing targets and tracking partnerships with external innovators over time. Once TiCR targets have been established, the CVC manager is armed with a simple yet powerful framework for evaluating new opportunities. The Innovation Capital system provides a powerful way to quickly Figure 1: Opportunities are visualized on an x/y scatter chart. identify the small subset of deals which have the highest potential to add value, and which are therefore worth spending the time and resources to carefully review. In addition to leveraging the strategic investment managers valuable time, this also speeds responses to the external stakeholders with whom maintaining strong relationships is critically important for the long-term viability of the program.

Capturing True Disruptions

Because the system is built around the firms existing technology and business landscape, it is important to have a mechanism for capturing the truly disruptive opportunities which, by their very nature, cannot be scored against existing enterprise values.4 Equally important, since the framework must weigh various strategic variables according to their potential to impact enterprise-wide goals, there is the potential for one or more exceptional strategic variables to be drowned out by the low scores of other variables present in the deal. We dub these exceptions (positive outliers in the language of statistical sampling) Golden Swans. There are two ways to capture Golden Swans: The system can be alerted to automatically flag deals which have one or more exceptional strategic variables All deals which fall below the threshold of relevance can be quickly scanned by an expert who can select appropriate ones to add to the small subset which the system has already identified. The Golden Swans also provide a valuable feedback mechanism for enhancing enterprise awareness. For example, if a high proportion of the deals that come in are tagged as Golden Swans, it suggests that the firms strategic priorities are out-of-step with the sentiments of the venture capital investors who invest in, and build, the future technology landscape. Thus, the Innovation Capital system provides a uniquely valuable reality check on the firms vision of the future. In addition to positive outliers, there is the potential to encounter negative outliers deals which might seem appealing on the surface, but which contain an unacceptable strategic variable, or violate some unarticulated priority that cannot be captured in the system (for example, an opportunity which may be similar in nature to a recently-failed project; too close for comfort to an internal R&D project; pet projects; or have the potential to create conflict with an important customer or business partner). We dub these deals Black Swans.

Rumsfeld strikes again

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Black Swans are false positives. Because we only have to concern ourselves with guarding against Black Swans from among the subset of deals which score above the strategic threshold, they are relatively small in number and can be handled manually. Another advantage of the TiCR system coupled with the Golden/Black Swan construct is that together they provide a powerful and compelling means of guarding against the risk of well-placed executives attempting to influence the strategic investment review process to favor pet projects. Once the entire set of opportunities has been run through the system, and Golden and Black Swans dealt with appropriately, CVC managers can focus on the small set of deals which have the potential to have significant impact. The result is that each deal sent to internal stakeholders will have the potential to be meaningful; this reduction in the signal-to-noise ratio has obvious implications for establishing and maintaining a strong reputation within the firm.

A Case Study
Early Phase Technology Initiative (EPTI): Schlumberger Limited (SLB)
Schlumberger Limited (NYSE:SLB) is the worlds leading oilfield services company, with $39.5BN in 2011 revenue, and over 110,000 people working in 80 countries to supply technology, information solutions, and integrated project management to optimize locating and extracting hydrocarbon resources. Customer demand & competitive forces require continuous improvement and constant new capabilities, particularly in areas relating to unconventional gas, deepwater operations, and enhanced recovery (hotter, deeper, harsher environments). Schlumberger is a strong, engineering-driven organization. It was founded based on a disruptive innovation5, and has enjoyed a reputation as technology leader and innovator over its 100+ year history. In addition to its $1BN+ R&D budget, SLB management has over the past three years issued an imperative to embrace external technologies as a means of maintaining the firms leadership position in the extremely dynamic exploration and production business. The EPTI was established as a response to the increasing importance of venture capital-backed innovators as a source of new technologies relevant to SLBs core businesses; the objective is to identify competitive-advantage conferring technologies being developed by nascent firms, and to secure their exclusive use for SLB by becoming an early, committed stakeholder. The value of this kind of open innovation sourcing is particularly significant for SLB, as early-stage technologies are: 1. Typically based on IP which is unobtainable to or not-easily-replicated by SLB 2. Initiated in a development environment and direction outside the parameters of a typical SLB R&D project 3. Developed in a geographical region which would not naturally bring it into contact with the SLB R&D organization 4. Often being developed in fields of use which would otherwise not be visible to SLB (but have tremendous potential value in SLBs businesses)

large corporation needs a balanced A portfolio of high-to-low risk development projects. Access to Innovation Ecosystem opportunities provided by Synchrony is an extremely effective means of accessing the high risk high reward disruptive technologies that have the potential to really change the game. Mukesh Kapila, Environmental Solutions
Applied Research, Corporate Director, Schlumberger Limited

In the early part of the 20th century the Schlumberger brothers were the first to successfully measure critical hydrocarbonbearing formation characteristics deep in oil wells.

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Innovation is critically important, but requires process and measurement to succeed. The nature of innovation makes depending upon wellestablished metrics unreliable; the innovation process is often subject to a great deal of uncertainty. Additionally, the fact that innovation changes the landscape and therefore distorts existing measures or creates entirely new ones adds to the complexity. Despite all of these challenges, in order for EPTI to thrive, it is critically important to establish operational goals and standards for determining the impact of its activities on SLBs businesses. As important as it is to understand the strengths of a solid initiative, it is equally important to keep in mind the damage that can be created by a program that is not well supported. A handicapped program is worse than none at all, as it can: Pollute SLBs relationship with innovation ecosystem players and foreclose future opportunities Sour internal actors and damage our efforts to instill appreciation for the tremendous value which can be created by leveraging the contribution of outsiders Send a message to internal stakeholders that external innovation is a potentially career-killing assignment
Tools merely offer the potential for collaboration. Unlocking the value of tools happens only when an organization fits tools into collaborative culture and processes. (Rosen n.d.)
Evan Rosen, Author of The Culture of Collaboration, Gold Medal Winner in the 2008 Axiom

Partner Model
In order to be successful, corporate stakeholders must adapt to Innovation Ecosystem rules and the realities imposed by the venture capital finance model. Trust and alignment of incentives are critical; with so much at stake, and such a large power disparity between the incumbent and its nascent partner, the standard terms of engagement which apply when titans partner with one another are inappropriate if the goal is to foster successful partnerships with start-ups. Rather, the incumbent must get the norms of their world. Incumbent firms must also be selfaware: no matter how well-managed, a large corporation is inevitably a collection of constituencies which often compete with one another for scarce resources or management favor. For a corporate venture investment initiative to succeed, a clear signal must be given that innovation is both valued and supported at all levels of the organization, and that portfolio companies must be nurtured and supported in their growth and development, not used as political footballs or harvested for value. Simply put, the goose lays golden eggs, it is not being fattened to for fois gras. To this end, it is critical to involve the relevant personnel in the evaluation, selection and partnering process, and to make sure that those people are temperamentally oriented towards collaboration. Knowing up-front that their existing R&D budgets will not be hindered or impacted by any additional technology development also strengthens stakeholders commitment to fostering strategic returns from the portfolio company. So strategic investment groups must have budget that they use to fund internal development projects.

The primary focus of the technology initiative is not to acquire cash-oncash returns for equity investments although traditional ROI does play a part in the measure of its success, and impacts on its sustainability but to acquire competitive-advantage conferring capabilities for use in SLBs value-chain. The true strategic value created in a successful partnership with an external innovator is notoriously challenging to quantify, yet it is a central and often pivotal component of an open innovation schema. Finally, financial ROI is only realized by exiting the investment; therefore, the usefulness of this measure in monitoring progress throughout the lifecycle of the partnership is extremely limited. A different set of analytics and measures is required: Synchrony Venture Managements Innovation Capital methodology helps us to establish those metrics, and provides a framework for meaningful analyses of both options and outcomes. SLB has engaged Synchrony Venture Management (SVM) to employ its framework for identifying and measuring strategic returns to the problem of prioritizing opportunities from amongst 15 well-differentiated

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technology domains encompassing over 170 discreet technologies. While complex, the problem is imminently solve-able. Using the Innovation Capital methodology, SLB has begun to: Prioritize the importance of technology areas in terms of their potential to contribute to enterprise-wide goals Systematically identify appropriate sources of technology in the external innovation ecosystem Efficiently evaluate the thousands of potential strategic investment opportunities it encounters each year Establish a means of articulating the expected outcome of a strategic partnership and its potential to contribute to strategic goals Assimilate a cyclic reporting system so that senior management remains engaged and informed

The Innovation Capital Model: Benefits to Schlumberger

For Schlumberger, the Innovation Capital method creates well-defined benefits: Meaningful competitive advantages through partnerships with external innovators A consistent, empirically-derived means of establishing metrics for targeting and tracking strategic value which encompasses equity returns, financial value created through partnership, and operating/strategic improvements

Schlumberger Planning & Targeting Considerations and Strategy to Attract Early Stage Partners
SLB must be clear on what it wants/expects out of deals Deals should be designed as a win/win for SLB and portfolio company Likewise, investor exits must be respected, even when those gains are only a small portion of the total value to SLB Early-Stage partnerships are critical to long-term sustainability and value-creation for SLB; access to the innovation ecosystem is a valuable asset which must be protected. If the analysis and approval process for each deal requires a fresh, multi-stage selling effort, the process will be unmanageable for all parties; the signal-to-noise ratio should be minimized in any way possible These activities are inherently long-term and require a stable effort over time; there has to be a protected path to success for all stakeholders

Resources & Budgeting

There is a need to properly support and resource both the internal partnership and early-stage partner in order to be successful SLB must bear in mind that it is competing for opportunities with both competitors and other potential strategic partners, and look for ways to be the partnerof-choice (in their field) The equity component must be separated from partnership budget to ensure proper valuation Cultures of the corporation and early-stage firms are inherently different. Partners frame-of-reference must be understood and taken into account; attempting to exploit power differentials will inevitably backfire in one way or another.

Process
Partners wont engage if they think SLB is unpredictable or unreliable; SLB should be able to lay out a diligence and approval process at the start of a deal, and make every effort to minimize unnecessary disruption to early-stage partners Connections to internal clients must be thoughtfully built and well-tended

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 A visible commitment to clarity & best practices which attracts top-tier VC investing partners Positioning the EPTI to be highly selective with respect to its investing partners has been established as a key priority since the programs launch Data-driven deal terms & value-apportionment between SLB & portfolio company An efficient way to ante-up in swapping dealflow with other strategic & VC investors

SLB Portfolio Compnay Case Study

Total Innovation Capital Returns : Anonymized portfolio company TiCR = (FROI + fROI) & sROI FROI is the equivalent to the traditional ROI measure of equity returns (expressed as $$) fROI refers to financial gains generated by the partnership between SLB and the portfolio company (expressed as $$) sROI is the strategic return on investment (expressed as a score, highlighting the improvement potential of the deal relative to strategic priorities) In the following example, we identify the elements that go into each of the two components of the financial and strategic returns for a company where a 10% equity stake was taken two years prior for $5M, a $50MM valuation. The portfolio company is developing a component that enables recovery of proven hydrocarbon reserves which were previously unobtainable due to practical limitations on extraction. The portfolio company was recently valued at $450MM by an independent, third-party firm, pegging SLBs stake at $45MM, or 9x ROI (FROI in Innovation Capital parlance) to date. fROI = 900% The new technology also provides significant improvements for several enterprise priorities, each of which is an element of the strategic return on investment (sROI) component of the TiCR model: An estimated 50% increased life expectancy than the component it replaced The new technology is estimated to be 25% less prone to failure Decreased Time-to-market by an estimated 15% An ability to leapfrog an industry consortium which is attempting to address the reserves production problem, thereby enabling SLB to have a proprietary solution rather than a commoditized solution years ahead of competitors (thereby creating a Competitive Barrier) Reputational gain due to the components environmentally friendliness Increased safety due to enhanced operational simplicity Finally, SLB was able to negotiate field-of-use exclusivity and most favored nation pricing for this component. These are not enterprise priorities as defined in the Innovation Capital model, but they are important of the overall TiCR evaluation. Using the TiCR expression: TiCR = (FROI + fROI) & sROI This opportunity ends up being articulated over a 5 year horizon as: TiCR = ($45MM + $535MM) & 637 or $580MM | 637 Where the relative score of 637 highlights the deal is of significant strategic importance.

In addition, with the technology opening up a new market, the following strategic financial elements (fROI) were determined by the business unit marketing teams: Annual Revenue gains of $30M in year one, growing to $150M by year 3 Cost savings of $10M/year due to performance improvements over the existing component (reduced maintenance, fewer spares required on site, less downtime) Enhanced Market share of 4% in year one due to exclusive access to the new technology, Lower Environmental costs of $15M/year due to reduced disposal needs.

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 Helps solve specific, well-identified SLB problems and stimulates orthogonal problem-solving Proactive targeting of highest-value spaces, rather than a reactive posture The Innovation Capital system is a much more relevant, actionable and measurable engagement model The Innovation Capital system is a better innovation sourcing model to satisfy foreseeable regulatory compliance challenges (e.g., regulatory changes Green Chemistry) The TiCR process imparts quantifiable financial value A defined set of product-development & value metrics, just as with as internal projects Quantifies the intangible elements of strategic investing/partnering to clarify decision-making Recognition opportunities for internal stakeholders The opportunity to align compensation model with contribution to achieving strategic goals

Conclusion
If partnering with early-stage firms is to become a sustainable, reliable contributor to helping a acquire competitive-advantage conferring capabilities, it must mature and evolve from a subjective, poorly-measured, and often politically-inflected process to one which provides senior managers with the same kind of analytic framework that they demand from every other critical corporate endeavor. It must become measurable. Synchronys Innovation Capital system is a data-driven, empirically sound framework which allows corporate investors to identify the technology and business areas which have the highest potential to create value through innovation; quickly screen and rank incoming opportunities; and track the contribution that strategic investments make to achieving enterprise goals. It engages internal stakeholders based on the priorities articulated by senior management, and can also provide valuable feedback as to whether those priorities are, indeed, aligned with the external innovation ecosystem. The Innovation Capital system allows widely divergent strategic variables to be expressed in an empirically sound, easy-to-comprehend metric; this dramatically improves internal uptake and management buy-in. It also dramatically reduces the time it takes to screen each deal. This allows strategic investment managers to quickly hone in on the highest-value opportunities from the hundreds reviewed each quarter, clearly communicate the potential value of deals in both financial and non-financial terms to internal stakeholders, and ensure that their own contributions are recognized. The method is scalable; it can be piloted in a limited fashion in a single division, and then easily scaled throughout the entire enterprise. Most importantly, the Innovation Capital system enables the same kind of numbers-driven approach to decision-making used throughout the enterprise. This increases confidence throughout the entire population of stakeholders from R&D to Product Management, Engineering to the C-Suite. Partnering with early-stage firms represents a compelling, cost-effective, P&L-enhancing means of reversing the dynamics that threaten technology leadership. To be successful, it must be approached and appreciated as a longterm initiative, and structured to reflect innovation ecosystem development processes and timeframes. We believe that the Innovation Capital system can provide the means to allow external investment/partnering initiatives to reach their full potential as a co-equal means of contributing to the value of a major corporations franchise.

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Acknowledgements
The authors are indebted to Heather Sternshein, Jessica Leibovitz, Chris Yan, Richard Williams and Bob Lodi, each of whom contributed invaluably to developing and articulating the Innovation Capital system, and/or to the production of this white paper. Much of whats good and useful is owed to them; all that is bad & ridonculous the domain of the authors. The Innovation Capital system is patent-pending. Well be sure to let you know when they get issued.

Further Reading
Chesbrough, Henry William. Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology. Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation, 2003. Christensen, Clayton. The Innovators Dilemna. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2011. OReilly, Tim. http://www.gereports.com/how-will-collaboration-and-disruption-drive-progress-against-breastcancer-highlights-from-ges-cancer-campaign-launch/. http://www.gereports.com (accessed December 28, 2011). Ries, Eric. The Lean Startup: How Todays Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. New York City: Random House, Incorporated, 2011. Todeva, Emanuela, and David Knoke. Strategic Alliances & Models of Collaboration. epubs.surrey.ac.uk. November 19, 2004. http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/1967/1/fulltext.pdf (accessed January 21, 2012). Rosen, Evan. http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/apr2010/ca20100419_510753.htm

For more information on the Innovation Capitalsm system or Synchronys services, please contact: Adam Caper Founder & Managing Director Synchrony Venture Management 10 Post Office Square North, Suite 615 Boston, MA 02109 617.247.6300 x1001 acaper@synchronyvm.com www.synchronyvm.com

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