The idea

Create a site for the publication and editing of Creative Commons-licensed business plans. Actively encourage people to “steal” ideas, improve on them, and compete with the original author to rally a team and/or investment.

What social need does it address?

Entrepreneurship is essential for creating wealth and jobs. In 2002, more than 460 million adults worldwide were engaged in entrepreneurial activity. Entrepreneurs take on a high degree of financial and personal risk, and most new businesses fail within a few years.

What’s new about it?

One cause of high failure rates of new businesses is a lack of experience of the team; another cause is a poor reception by the market for the new product or service. The Idea Belt could help address both these – by allowing team-members with complementary skills to find each other, and by exposing ideas to the harsh light of public criticism at an early stage.

A few sites exist for “crowdsourcing” business ideas and opinions, like cambrianhouse.com, and for bringing together people with ideas to improve society, like globalideasbank.org. The Business Experiment encouraged debate about submitted ideas but boiled them down to a single winner, after which participation dropped off dramatically. These use a relatively static model – one person posts an idea, and others comment or rate it, but cannot edit it.

The main novelty of the Idea Belt would be the ease of copying and modifying other people’s ideas. Our premise is that an idea has no value on its own, and initial ideas are overrated for a venture’s success. Idea Belt would take this to the extreme and create a ‘commons’ of ideas that people can use as they wish. Note that a ‘commons’ of ideas is not incompatible with profit. Entrepreneurs can profit from building businesses — by actually doing the work of turning ideas into useful products that the market wants to buy.

What inspired you?

We are awed by the high failure rate of new businesses and want to reduce the risk of starting one. We have also met many nascent entrepreneurs who have a deep fear of exposing their ideas widely for fear of rip-offs, and are therefore depriving themselves of the criticism and opportunities for forming teams that they so desperately need. But opportunities are endless, because the market’s needs are endless, but the supply of entrepreneurial talent is finite.

Idea submitted by Ed Schofield and Wallis Motta

Ed works at Imense Ltd, a Cambridge-based tech startup.

Wallis is a PhD student in anthropology at UCL.