Our Services

Strategic Investment Seminar
The Strategic Investment Seminarsm provides important internal stakeholders with a ½ to 1-day seminar familiarizing them with the opportunity to gain competitive advantage through strategic investing, and the required steps a firm must take to make a program successful. It can optionally include a hands-on workshop which engages key internal stakeholders in the process of identifying initial areas for partnership with outside firms.

CVC Program Auditing
Synchrony offers a review of existing strategic investment programs to analyze their current efficacy with respect to delivering strategic value, and to recommend a path to improvement if one is necessary.

Innovation Capital^sm Program Development
One of the hallmarks of the Innovation Capital system is its robust, rigorous planning process. For a firm considering strategic investment as a means of acquiring new capabilities, there are three important questions which must be answered:

What are the potential benefits if the firm launches a program?
What will we need to do to be successful?
How do we build mechanisms to target investments and keep things on track?

Synchrony has a structured process, which we call the Strategic Investment Assessment, to answer these questions. We start by identifying the specific areas of a firm’s business which can be helped dramatically by working with early-stage firms, and report those findings to senior management. If they like what they see, we use the Innovation Capital toolkit to design and articulate a strategy for success which takes into account both internal and external factors. If that is also approved of, we make a blueprint for operating the unit.

Innovation Capital^sm Program Support
For existing teams which wish to adopt the Innovation Capital system to manage their system but don’t want to work with an outside partner, we can provide long-term support using Innovation Capital tactics, tools, & methods.

Long-Term Innovation Capital^sm Partnering
For firms which recognize the difficulties of maintaining an effective effort over time but wish to maintain the focus of their Innovation Capital activities inside of the corporate envelope rather than having it move outwards, we can integrate our tools, methods, and staff resources to act as a fully-engaged outside partner with a long-term commitment built around shared incentives.

Innovation Capital^sm Program Management
Many firms recognize that many of the challenges which lead to the high rate of failure of CVC programs are a direct function of the difficulties of trying to operate as a player in the VC marketplace with people who are embedded in corporate culture, values, measures of success, etc. For those firms, we offer a long-term, fully-committed, ongoing management relationship. The model for this is the “single-LP fund”, in which the company acts as Limited Partner and Synchrony as the General Partner in a jointly-governed Innovation Capital fund.

There are a number of distinct advantages to this model: long-term commitment; a much higher conformity to VC/innovation ecosystem culture, practices and compensation models; annual rather than quarterly mark-to-market reporting; diminished risk of losing “arms-length” status relative to IRS and other regulatory standards; a much faster path to acceptance by top-tier VC firms; and much lower risk that the program’s ability to be effective is compromised over time by being captured/co-opted by internal dynamics.