How do you pitch game changing ideas at work without just handing over free value?

Here's my situation. I work at a large company in a industry I genuinely love. I'm not just an employee going through the motions. I use the products, I understand the customer, and I happen to have deep expertise in AI.

I've been sitting on some ideas that I think could help drive more revenue and bring in real growth. Not small improvements. I'm talking about a pretty significant lift that could open up entirely new revenue or dramatically improve how we do things.

The problem is the classic employee dilemma. If I bring these ideas to leadership and they work, the company wins big. But what do I get? A pat on the back? Maybe a bonus that's a fraction of the value created? A promotion that takes 18 months to materialize?

I've seen this play out before at other companies. Someone brings a transformative idea, does the heavy lifting to make it happen, and the reward doesn't come close to matching the impact. Meanwhile the company captures all the upside. Yea, I know, thats part of being an employee but I'm looking for more.

I genuinely want to do this work. I'm passionate about it. But I also want to be smart about it. I don't want to just hand over millions of dollars worth of ideas in exchange for my regular salary.

Some options I've been thinking about:

• Pitch it and negotiate a performance-based comp structure tied to results before I start
• Propose it as a special project with equity or profit-sharing built in.
• Build it on my own as a side project and license/sell it back to the company
• Just leave and build it independently

Each one has obvious tradeoffs and risks. I'm leaning toward finding a way to do it within the company but with a real incentive structure and just have no idea how to even approach this properly.

For those who've been in a similar spot... how did you approach it? What worked, what didn't? And if you're in leadership, what kind of pitch from an employee would actually get you to agree to something beyond standard comp?