Idea Garage

One Sentence Summary

A mobile application for scanning business cards and adding them to an organized electronic address book.

Executive Summary

If you’ve ever been to a conference, a career fair, or any other networking event, you are familiar with the hassle of dealing with the business cards you collect. With most contact information being stored electronically, sorting and managing paper business cards seems antiquated.

A better solution would be to use an application on your mobile phone that could scan the business cards, recognize the content, and create an electronic contact entry in your address book. There are currently only a couple of these available on the Android market and a few in the iPhone app store. The existing applications are not well known or comprehensive. Creating an enterprise quality application and marketing it to businesses is a significant new market opportunity.

One Sentence Summary

Specialized sales force rental for startups.

Executive Summary

Sales is often an area where startup founders with a product, technical, or even business background have the least amount of experience. While there are quite a few freelance sales people for hire and sales staffing agencies that can fill roles, these are not necessarily affordable or speedy alternatives to taking a product to market.

A better option would be a company that employed specialized and experienced sales professionals with established relationships in specific verticals (e.g., telecommunications companies, financial institutions, consumer packaged goods brands, etc.). This company would be able to provide affordable, or perhaps even risk-free (commission only), pricing to startups due to its scale and expertise, while the startup would reap a higher conversion rate due to the sales team’s existing connections and past experience.

One Sentence Summary

Idea Garage is excited to introduce its first startup – BeautyBloc.com, a group buying website for beauty products and services!

Executive Summary

If you currently subscribe to a generic group buying website, you likely receive e-mails on deeply discounted deals in your area every day. Of the 28-31 offers you receive each month, you might buy one, at best. The challenge is that the deals can range from vegan fare to paintball gun ammunition to facials.

Carefully targeting the deals based on user preferences would be a better approach that would result in both increased conversion, as subscribers would receive more relevant deals, as well as higher quality customers for the vendors that offer the deals due to the fact that subscribers would indicate an explicit interest in the types of products or services that the vendor offers.

The top group buying websites available currently have not yet mastered the skill of targeting their deals, however a site like BeautyBloc.com is a viable alternative. By solely focusing on a single industry (beauty products and services), subscribers can effectively self-select into beauty deals and receive more relevant offers. The focus also allows BeautyBloc.com‘s sales team to procure higher quality offers from vendors.

One Sentence Summary

Allow elementary, middle, and high schools to attain certifications backed by reputable brands to foster high standards and attract families that prioritize high quality education.

Executive Summary

The statistics describing the dismal state of K-12 education in the United States continue to remind Americans that the system requires vast improvements. Unfortunately, these enhancements are difficult, if not impossible, to attain, particularly for money-starved public schools. While most schools are aware of the performance benchmarks they are expected to meet, many of them don’t have defined standards and practices that, if implemented, would enable them to meet these expectations.

One opportunity to improve this conundrum is to establish clear, consistent standards for K-12 coursework, learning methodologies, etc. backed by a respected brand or source. For instance, a top university, or the International Baccalaureate program, or even a pertinent government body of a country that has a high quality public education system. A school that would choose to meet these standards would be certified by the organization that defined them.

This would give public schools not just the benchmarks to strive for, but also the means to achieve these benchmarks. Public schools that are certified would be able to better compete with private schools as well as offer families that care about top notch education but cannot afford a private school a viable alternative.

The funding, both for the investment required to achieve the standards as well as the payment to the standard-defining body itself, could come from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, grants, donations, government funding, community fundraising, and other avenues.

One Sentence Summary

Logic, math, and other puzzles for brain teaser enthusiasts.

Executive Summary

There is a surprisingly low number of websites that do a good job of replicating what puzzle books and kits have done for years – providing a continuous source of fun and challenging brain teasers to entertain puzzle enthusiasts. This is likely because most of these sites are operated as a hobby by volunteers or ad-supported with minimal traffic, meaning that the incentives to invest effort into keeping them constantly up to date are low.

A better model would be to adopt either the WordPress Plugin approach, where loyal users are asked to donate, and/or charge a nominal subscription fee (e.g., $1/month). This would create a revenue model that puts incentives in place for investing the energy required to drive up traffic and improve conversion. Additional revenue streams could eventually come from branded merchandise as well.

This, of course, this is predicated upon having a great product in the first place. The puzzles need to be fresh and challenging, with social rewards, such as points, badges, rankings, etc. and other user engagement tactics, such as weekly contests, integrated throughout the site and its marketing campaigns.

Prototype

Website: http://sites.google.com/site/zelzup/

Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/zelzup/52296954356?v=wall

Twitter Profile: http://twitter.com/zelzup

One Sentence Summary

A middleman that simplifies rebate claims for the consumer.

Executive Summary

Research demonstrates that the vast majority of rebate offerings are never claimed by the consumer. While this strategy has served vendors well, it has proved frustrating to their customers. The primary reason for rebates not being claimed is that they usually require an investment of time and effort to fill out and submit fairly detailed forms with, often multiple, proofs of purchase.

A middleman could simplify this process by having consumers fill in a one-time form with the information typically requested by vendors (e.g., name, address, telephone number, etc.) to create a rebate account that could be used for all future claims. The middleman would also need to offer a very simple submission process (e.g., postage paid self addressed envelopes/containers that consumers could use to mail their receipts, packaging, etc. for specific rebate offers). The middleman would take on the more time-consuming part of the work (cutting out UPCs, automatically filling in the rebate forms using each customer’s account information, etc.) and take a cut of the rebate amount in return.

Eventually, this process can be simplified and automated further as the middleman builds relationships with key high-volume vendors, where, assuming certain controls were built in, consumers could initiate their claims by submitting pictures of the receipts and packaging/UPCs electronically instead of having to mail them in.

One Sentence Summary

A third party career services offering for higher education institutions that cannot afford to have extensive, highly-skilled staff internally.

Executive Summary

Numerous colleges and universities have relatively weak career services offices both in terms of the level of staffing as well as the staff’s experience. The amount and quality of other resources, such as interview training materials, also vary greatly across schools. This is a particularly salient issue at times of economic distress when jobs are hard to come by, especially for new graduates who lack industry experience.

A potential solution to this problem would be to outsource career services to a third party. This firm would specialize in career counseling and scale its resources, best practices, and expert staff across its client higher education institutions. Because the third party will be able to achieve significant economies of scale by working with numerous colleges and universities, it will typically constitute a lower cost, yet higher quality, alternative to having career services in-house for schools that cannot afford to invest sufficiently in this function.

One Sentence Summary

Improve work-life balance for employees of client companies by helping them become more efficient.

Executive Summary

Inadequate work-life balance is one of the most oft cited grievances by employees, particularly in the United States, where the work week is among the longest in the world. Many organizations have lost some of their top talent due to burnout and the pursuit of more life-friendly careers.

In numerous cases, the lengthy hours are a result of suboptimal efficiency and poor organizational practices. While some individuals have been able to make a difference in their own work-life balance through time-management training, rigorous prioritization, and other means, it takes a proactive effort by entire organization to make a truly significant improvement in the lives of their employees.

A consulting service that scales time-management training, prioritization techniques, and other methods of improving efficiency as well as encourages a gradual shift in corporate culture could help client companies become more productive as well as offer a significant benefit to their employees through improved work-life balance and job satisfaction. Note that research has tied job satisfaction not only to work-life balance, but also to the sense of being productive.

The consulting firm could quantify the value proposition to its clients in terms of increased productivity, reduced turnover, and lower overtime costs for hourly employees, as well as potentially lower talent acquisition costs due to the attractiveness of a reasonable work-life balance, which could serve as a key differentiator from other employers.

One Sentence Summary

Speedy and risk-free mobile application development for companies that seek to establish a mobile presence.

Executive Summary

With the growing proliferation of smartphones, companies are moving fast to establish a mobile presence, but some are falling behind due to resource and budget constraints, competing priorities, or a lack of sufficient focus. For instance, Zipcar does not yet have a quality Android application when Android’s market share is estimated to be over 16% in 2010 and expected to grow to ~25% by 2014.

A quicker route to mobile ubiquity by the brands we know and love would be to outsource the development, but this can become costly and exceed budget constraints. An alternative would be to work with a mobile development shop that also assumes some or all of the risk / costs in return for higher potential rewards.

For instance, Zipcar’s Android application could be developed by a third party that completes the project free of charge, but retains the intellectual property rights to the application and is allowed to either charge a nominal fee for it on the Android Market or receive revenue from the associated ads. Clearly, there may not be a positive return on the developer’s investment in all cases and a financial analysis would need to be completed for each brand. Given the proliferation of Zipcar’s iPhone application, the business case for working with them looks quite good.

While this model could also be used to help startups, the business cases f0r established brands with high adoption expectations will likely be stronger in most instances.

The third party development shop may choose to subcontract out the development at the outset to reduce their own risk / startup costs, then hire in-house developers once the company gains scale.

One Sentence Summary

Help non-profits operate more efficiently to make the most of their funding.

Executive Summary

Quite a few of the larger non-profits already receive pro bono management consulting from top firms, such as McKinsey, BCG, and Bain. Getting consulting services free of charge is more difficult for smaller and/or newer non-profits and few strategy consultants look at the smaller picture tactical improvements that could add up to material increases in what a non-profit can accomplish with each dollar of funding.

For instance, there was recently a Habitat for Humanity project in East Bay where a team of about ten people left frustrated after hardly being able to do any work during the eight hours they volunteered out of their busy day. Why? A single tool (a hammer) was the bottleneck and because only one hammer was available on the site, the majority of the team spent the majority of the day waiting. Had more of the $5 hammers been furnished, Habitat for Humanity would have ultimately gotten a far higher return on its investment in the form of completed homes (there were several teams that rotated in and out of the project over the course of several days and none were able to complete a home).

Unfortunately, these types of inefficiencies are extremely common. Consulting services that would offer some basic process engineering and operational improvement advice could go a long way towards addressing this problem. The services could be funded by any combination of charitable contributions, philanthropic investment from existing for-profit consulting firms, and consulting fees from larger, more established non-profits that can afford to pay. Smaller and/or newer non-profits could be subsidized by the preceding financing and receive services pro bono.