Pivot Labs

Structured Experimentation with Real Companies

Pivot Labs are CEO-led working sessions focused on a single, clearly defined economic constraint. Each lab begins with operating reality, not theory.

Initial Lab Focus Areas

Pivot Labs are addressing the affordability crisis, environmental challenges, and community economic fragility. Each lab is designed around exploring and solving - redesigning systems to create a more equitable future.

Compensation and benefits redesign

Affordability and benefit cliffs for employees

Talent attraction and retention volatility

Environmental and supply-chain exposure

AI adoption and worker displacement

How a Lab Works

Define

Define the constraint or challenge clearly.

Map

Map incentives and tradeoffs.

Design

Design potential solutions and run bounded experiments.

Model

Model outcomes before scaling.

Implement

Implement, document, and analyze results.

Elevate

Make the case to appropriate governmental officials and policy makers as necessary.

Pivot Lab Approach

Redesigning the Virtuous - diagram illustrating the virtuous cycle for Internality

Internality.ai Informs and Accelerates Through Simulation

Explore Innovations

Interact with a growing open-source library of proven strategies, research findings, and documented experiments from Pivot Labs worldwide — built in partnership with university research teams. Every innovation is tagged by industry, challenge type, and scale — making cross-lab learning practical, not theoretical.

Diagnose Exposure

Analyze where your workforce, environmental, and systemic impact externalities are largest, where quick wins exist, and where deeper experimentation through a Pivot Lab would deliver the most value — benchmarked against peer datasets from across the network.

Simulate Scenarios

Model the impact of proposed interventions before implementing them. Test questions like: 'What happens to retention if we restructure benefits? What's the community-wide effect if five employers in our region adopt this approach?' De-risk innovation with evidence.

Outcomes

What Comes Out

Documented Experiments

Rigorous documentation of each experiment and its conditions.

Replicable Interventions

Interventions designed to be adapted and applied by other organizations.

Modeled Tradeoffs

Clear models of tradeoffs so leaders can make informed decisions.

Applicable Evidence

Evidence ready for broader application across sectors and contexts.

Recursive Knowledge Base

Evidence that informs InterNality OS, enabling comprehensive simulations of business systems.

Systemic Change

Accumulation of a corpus of business innovation for transformation to a new economy.

Labs turn uncertainty into insight and insight into action.

I'm Interested

FIRST PIVOT LAB — NOW FORMING

Addressing the Affordability Crisis in West Michigan

Our inaugural Pivot Lab is forming in western Michigan, bringing together CEOs of mid-to-large privately held companies to tackle a shared constraint: how to make compensation and benefits work for employees and businesses in an era of rising costs and stagnant real wages.

The problem is concrete. In the Grand Rapids region, $30/hour is what's needed to live without financial stress — yet a significant share of employees at even well-managed companies are barely making it paycheck to paycheck. The current system forces employees to navigate a complex maze of wages, benefits, and government assistance programs that were never designed to work together.

This lab won't produce a white paper. It will produce tested interventions: new approaches to compensation structure, benefits design, and cross-company career mobility that participating CEOs commit to implementing in their own organizations. Academic partners will rigorously evaluate the results. What works gets documented and shared through InterNality OS so other companies and regions can adapt and adopt.

Format: 3–4 working sessions over several months, each 3–4 hours, with structured prework and diagnostic analysis between sessions.
Participation: By invitation.
Partners: University of Michigan Ross School of Business (research), The Source (workforce data).