We pay your wages, but the IP rights for anything you create in your 20% time are 100% yours

If we like your innovations, we’ll offer to buy them off you at market value

We’re feeling really brave. We know we could be seriously hurting ourselves by doing this.

a d v e r t i s e m e n t

Is your startup accelerator in trouble?

  • is the whole thing starting to look like a ‘one hit wonder’?
  • were the applicants below expectations?
  • are you feeling out of your depth?
  • is the schedule beginning to look unrealistic?
  • are you beginning to feel that you ‘went native’ with the founders’ optimism?

You’re not alone

You need to talk to us

We’ve been studying startup accelerators

It turns out these problems, and a whole lot more, affect all accelerators in their early stages

They can all be put right

Read about how we can help

iij Consulting

You could easily put our best ideas into your 20 percent and give our legal department a serious, maybe incurable headache.

You could easily find reasons to charge us much more for your innovations than we feel we deserve to be charged by someone we helped.

Alternatively you could go and use all your 20 percent work to help our competitors, or even become a serious competitor yourself.

You could do things to make what we get for the 80 percent of your time that you work on our in-house projects seem like poor value.

But we figure that you won’t want to do that

Why not?

Because we figure you’ll respect the unequivocal investment that we’re making in your integrity.

We’re brave, but not necessarily completely crazy.

We’d have to pay for innovation anyway and we know most real innovation comes from outside.

This way, we’ll be gambling on the chance that helping an innovator who’s working on our projects will produce innovations that are a better fit for our business, developed by someone we already trust.

We even think this approach to your 20 percent will also make everybody’s 80 percent more productive, because what they are getting for doing it is more than just ‘compensation’.

We want to go further still

We want to offer you training and mentoring so that the fruits of that 20 percent can be more than just opportunities for us.

We’ll give you the resources you need in order to learn how to be an entrepreneur, able to run your own startup, we’ll even fund independent mentoring so that you can learn how to negotiate deals with us (which will almost inevitably make us half-wish we had left you ignorant).

We’re doing this for one very selfish reason: we believe that the best way to foster innovation that we can use, is to foster innovators we can trust.

And putting someone on the payroll, but giving them the freedom to be the kind of outsider we need, is an experiment that may just put us one step ahead of everyone else.