I'd do a Licensing Arangement.
While you retain ownership of the property under license, you also retain the responsibility for its quality and correctness. An unscrupulous licensor can drive you out of business by demanding an absurd level of support and litigating over it. The motivation in many cases to sell intellectual property to a larger entity is to acquire that entity's resources for continued devleopment, marketing, and support of the idea. That doesn't occur in a typical licensing arrangement.
Of course if you want the money now to pay off those after your house, it might not be a perfect solution.
All these scenarios depend on your financial posture and your tolerance of risk. I'm pointing out examples of cases in which valuable ideas are kept from usefulness. Of course that doesn't apply to the commercial treatment of all ideas, or even describe a general method of commerce. When I'm asked how prevalent this is, I can say it's prevalent enough for me to cite several real-world, first-hand experiences off the top of my head, but that doesn't intend to say that all idea-selling ends that way.
If you are a big company, there are several ways of exerting pressure on small companies that innovate a hole in your business model. Since a substantial percentage of those companies are hoping to be bought before their money runs out, buying them and throwing them in the Dumpster is one option, but certainly not the way it's always done, or the only way of doing them in (if that's what you really believe you need to do).
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