Say you’re a small technology company with a great idea for your clients, but you lack the in-house expertise to make it happen. There are a couple of ways you could try to move forward. You could hire technical staff, build out a new department with the required capabilities, and develop the entire solution internally. That has the advantage of creating new, proprietary intellectual property that unambiguously belongs exclusively to the company, and if there is already a known market for the product it can be a great way to grow. But building new capabilities internally is often expensive and risky, and it can take a long time to find and hire the right people.