Before founding BRI, its principals Jim and Stephen worked for many years within Intel's New Business Incubator. Intel was one of the first companies to aggressively pursue non-organic growth and investment strategies, with the formation of Intel Capital in 1991, and the internal incubator in 1998.  Intel Capital has generated billions of dollars in investment returns for Intel and is one of the largest corporate strategy equity investors in the world. The New Business Incubator was one of the earliest examples of applying Venture Capital-like investment and portfolio management strategies to internally focused, diverse, new business opportunities.

In the earliest days of the incubator, Jim and Stephen were serial intrapreneurs, founding and leading several new business ventures across a broad range of market segments and technologies, from consumer to business and from silicon to hardware systems, to software and cloud-service based businesses.  In the second and third iterations of the incubator itself, they became part of the incubator's leadership team where they helped drive the incubators alignment within Intel's overall growth strategy, and improvements in the overall strategy and approach for how the incubator would operate. In that time, they engaged with leading strategy and innovation academics like Robert Burgleman from Standford, Clayton Christensen from Harvard, among others as well as corporate innovation and incubation leaders from many other Fortune 500 companies, where they shared and explored best practices.

Below are just a few samples of some of the projects Jim and Stephen supported within Intel's New Business Incubator.