If you have not been reading Umair Haque's blog, I suggest you do it NOW. His recent articles offered a new way to think about strategies: from consumption to investment. This is quite a powerful lens to to create startups ideas if you think about it.
Most businesses want users to consume somthing. What if we flip that idea around? Rather than endless consumption, how do we form businesses that encourages users to invest in things like environment, education, health, skills et al?
Let's take fashion. How do we go link up the many independent fashion designers to not only sell their latest collection but to form an initiative to teach other people how to create fashion pieces themselves? Is there money to be made? Of course there is. Just look at the market for informal training. What we need is some simple technologies to structure the educational content from these fashion designers and to form communities around them.
Another simple idea: form a sellaband or kiva equivalent to raise fund for park building. With the continusous devastion of our natural environment, especially within dense cities, such a project will gather many supporters. Business model? How about converting the carbon credit generated by the park and trading them on carbon exchanges?
Changing from consumption to investment model requires an act faith. A belief that what you are doing matters. Sometimes, I think business models will not be as evident as the examples I have given above. However with sufficient exploration of strategic experiments, I am confident that this is a very rich area for startups to experiment.
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