The Saudi Offset Limited Partnership (SOLP) is an innovative vehicle that presents a well-known commercial development methodology — venture capital limited partnerships, together with defense contractors’ offset performance objectives where a country’s offset objectives are primarily aimed at development and investment in commercial ventures. 

Defence contractors have realised that their corporate cultures and core competencies do not lend themselves to developing cost effectively successful commercial ventures in industry areas that lie outside their core business.  Even though tremendous efforts and large amounts of money have been spent, neither contractors nor the host countries have fully achieved their objectives. 
A limited partnership structure such as the SOLP, which brings in a general partner, independent from the defense contractors to perform the actual development and investment work and which ties the performance objectives of the offset programmes and contractors to the primary compensation of the general partner, is proving to be a better answer for all parties.