Build? Buy? Borrow?

Pinaki Bhowmick

21 minutes ago

5 min read

First thing first. If you're a CTIO or CDO, you've fought this battle before, usually over whether to license a platform or build the thing yourself on your own APIs. Fair fight. But this article isn't about that fight.

There's another kind of Build vs. Buy conversation happening in the same boardrooms, and it has nothing to do with your tech stack. It's about who actually drives the innovation mandate that just landed on your desk.

You've got board approval for it. A budget that sounds decent until you price anything against it. And a blinking cursor on a slide titled Innovation Strategy 2026/27.

Yet... Six months later... you still have the blinking cursor. Just a nicer font. May be, even with a bold font.

I've watched this happen to sharp, capable CXOs across three continents. Not because they lacked ambition. Because the moment they got the mandate, they were handed exactly two options, and both are basically traps dressed up as decisions.

Option One: Hire a Chief/Head of Innovation, stand up a team, give it eighteen months to "show results." The Build.
Option Two: Call one of the usual consulting names, sign a statement of work, wait for the deck. The Buy.

But, surprisingly, there is hardly any discussion about a Third Option.

And it happens to be the one that fits best when you're short on budget and even shorter on clarity about what you're actually solving for!

'Build' is a slow, expensive bet on a stranger!

Sure thing. Here's what the Build option actually costs, in this context, in numbers that check out.

Retained executive search fees run 25 to 38 percent of first-year compensation. On a fairly modest $300K package, that's $75,000 to $105,000 in search fees alone, before you've paid the person a rupee (or a dollar) of salary. And you'll wait for it: C-suite searches average 60 to 120 days, with nearly 40 percent of senior roles taking over 90 days to close.

So, you've committed a small fortune and a full quarter, minimum, before your new innovation leader has even unpacked their laptop.

Wait, that's not all. Here comes the part that should really give any board pause:

The average tenure of a Chief Innovation Officer is under two years. Compare that to a CFO (5 to 6 years) or a CEO (4 to 5 years). It's not because these hires are unqualified. It's because most organizations hire the person before they've defined the problem, hand them a vague mandate, surround them with executives who quietly see innovation as someone else's job, and then wonder why the "innovation guy" burns out or gets sidelined inside twenty-four months.

So its not that your hiring decissions and process are slow - this is more about hiring blind, and then acting surprised when blind didn't work out.

Getting the picture?

'Buy' often gets you a deck, and sometimes what you were expecting. The traction is extra!

The Buy option feels safer because it's familiar. You call a name everyone's heard of, sign a statement of work for the innovation strategy work, and a few months later you get a beautifully bound roadmap, maybe a lab full of proof-of-concepts with excellent Post-it note game.

Here's the difficult part: Roughly 70 percent of transformation initiatives fail to meet their stated goals, a figure from McKinsey and BCG research that's held up depressingly well across two decades of studies. Not because the thinking was bad. Because the agency that wrote the strategy isn't the one who has to live inside your org chart and make it happen.

I'm not here to take a cheap shot at Innovation Strategy Consulting, and credit where it's due. Plenty of that work is genuinely excellent. And the ground is genuinely shifting there. McKinsey now ties roughly a quarter of its global fees to outcomes, and the wider digital and technology transformation world is following, pushed along by AI compressing how much billable thinking a project actually needs.

But that shift hasn't really reached corporate innovation consulting, the workshops, the labs, the hackathons, the ideation sprints. Most of that work is still priced the old way: fixed fee, fixed scope, deliverable handed over, invoice raised, see you at the next off-site. Execution risk stays with you. Still does, in this corner of the industry.

Here's the Third Option, that only a handful consider as a genuine option: Borrow

Before you build a team you can't yet justify, and before you buy a strategy you'll have to execute yourselves anyway, there's a third move. Borrow the expertise, shoulder-to-shoulder, for exactly as long as the problem needs it, with someone whose job is to work themselves out of a job.

This isn't a fringe idea anymore. It's a fully arrived market shift. The number of professionals on LinkedIn who self-identify as "fractional" went from about 2,000 in 2022 to over 110,000 today. That's not a niche trend, that's a stampede. Gartner projects that by 2027, more than 30 percent of midsize enterprises will have at least one fractional executive on retainer. The market isn't debating whether Borrow works. It's already voting for it.

And this is where I'll be honest about something most people selling this model won't say: Fractional isn't magically better than Build or Buy.

It's better suited to right now, to the exact moment you're standing in, where you don't yet have enough evidence to justify a permanent hire or a big-ticket engagement. It buys you something Build and Buy structurally cannot, which is the ability to find out if you're solving the right problem before you spend real money finding out you weren't.

Hope the table below explains this better!

Why the sequencing matters more than the choice itself

There's a reason so many leaders freeze at this decision. A recent HSBC study on business decision-making found 85 percent of leaders reported real decision distress in the past year, and 28 percent said uncertainty straight-up paralyzes them into inaction.

That's not a personal failing. That's what happens when you're told to make an irreversible, expensive commitment (hire! buy!) before you have the information to make it well.

Jeff Bezos had a rule of thumb for this, roughly: most good decisions should be made with something like 70 percent of the information you wish you had. Wait for 90 percent, and you've simply waited too long, the market moved on without you.

Borrowing is how you get to that 70 percent honestly and cheaply.

You bring in a PlayerCoach, not an advisor who disappears after the workshop, not a hire who needs six months to find their feet, not a trainer who keeps the classrooms busy.

You bring someone who gets into the actual problem with your team, produces real movement, and hands you evidence. Then, and only then, you decide whether the next right move is to Build a permanent function, Buy a bigger engagement for a now-clear scope, or simply keep Borrowing because it's still working.

That's not indecision. That's sequencing. There's a difference, and most organizations have never been taught it.

One question before you go back to that strategy slide

If your innovation mandate is still stuck at the blinking cursor stage, ask yourself honestly: are you actually unsure what to do, or are you just waiting to feel certain before you're willing to act at all?

Because certainty was never on the menu. Evidence was.

And you can get evidence a lot faster, and a lot cheaper, than you think.

What's the real reason your innovation mandate hasn't moved in the last quarter? I'd genuinely like to know.