De-Risking Business Models

Steve Barch has some interesting suggestions for entrepreneurs. He recently gave a talk at DreamIt Ventures, a Y Combinator-like fund.

TechShop

LifeScience has an interesting video on TechShop, a place where inventors can use shared, expensive equipment. It's a great notion.

IdeaScale

IdeaScale is an interesting take on creating a community around innovation, especially within a company.

According to their home page:

Users visit a company branded IdeaScale portal

They post ideas, suggestions and comments

They may also expand upon other ideas

They vote other ideas up and down

Highly rated and expanded ideas automatically "bubble" to the top

Risk-taking

Quentin has a good post on risk-taking and startups. One hope with StartupCents is that it will be possible to leverage communities of people interested in innovation to allow great ideas to be implemented, even if the people with the ideas are in risk-averse parts of their life.