Although modeled on Columbia's technology licensing office, Columbia Innovation Enterprise, there is a key difference: it is a profit-making company, albeit one wholly owned by Columbia.
Last week, when it fell into the hands of hedge funds, they muttered that its status as a public limited company – albeit one wholly owned by the Co-op – meant it was a strange hybrid, instead of a "true" mutual, so its near-collapse held few wider lessons for the sector.
If one looks at the last 10 years in politics through the prism of public v private or state v market it is hard not be more impressed by Labour's break with its own past - its acceptance that there can be state failure as well as market failure, and its attempts (albeit not wholly successful) to create new institutions that blur the line between private and public.
Though the death and destruction these acts caused were on the scale of war, the acts themselves were acts of terrorism, albeit on a wholly unprecedented level.
Luyt's "tired and emotional" outburst – the description offered at the time by the urbane Springbok manager and former national captain Morne du Plessis – was, and remains, hard to forgive, but there are many oval-ball aficionados up there on the high veld who believe to this day that he was making a semi-reasonable point, albeit in a wholly unreasonable way.
Mr Putin, he argues, believes that Russia needs to return to the Middle East, albeit in a wholly different role to that of the Soviet Union.
I spent the afternoon hours of August 11, 2014 on a plane six and a half miles off the ground, wholly (albeit briefly) disconnected from the constant refresh of life in the digital age.
What is more, the American naval and air bases in Hawaii on that Sunday morning in 1941 came under attack from a conventional naval force (albeit one employing the wholly new tactic of seaborne air power) deployed by a state whose identity and aspirations were no mystery.
Kandell wrote, "There's something that feels particularly satisfying about watching a wholly sympathetic, albeit fictional, character like Leslie Knope do well by her own ambition and by her friends".
And perhaps, the most famous hybrid is a case from our own past: when humans and Neanderthals mated and bred – albeit with significant, but not wholly insurmountable, fertility challenges.
