We should remember that sometimes business model innovations are as/more important than product – Google being the greatest example of a startup that was business-model-innovation oriented.
Nice presentation from Nick De Mey from Board of Innovation, here’s what they offered up (I edited their list a bit):
- Free service with a focus, sell the data, forget privacy (PatientsLikeMe.com)
- Automate donations, take a cut (Flattr)
- Groupon. Coupons. ‘Nuff said.
- Freemium content delivery with advertising support of free (Spotify)
- “Bribing people to ‘Like’ You” – pay for user promotion – PayWithATweet.com
- In-app sales
- Co-design / crowd-funding, quirky.com
Some of these are already big – In-App sales, for instance – while others, like PayWithATweet.com, seem destined to be seen as too cheesy for the mass market?
[Via TechCrunch]
My Perfect Startup 
Talking to myself 🙂
Others – Bar-code scanning + bargain hunting, take cut of savings, or revenue (Checkpoint)
What about Quora – do they have an inkling of their business model?
I think describing the financial transactions that Flattr is trying to automate as “donations” is a bit misleading. It’s really an online take on the old restaurant chestnut “We don’t have prices, pay us what you think the meal is worth.” (I seem to remember a Jamaican restaurant in Oxford did that, but it was too intimidating to deal with, so we only ate in it once.) Yawn. If you’re talking donations for real, meaning donations to worthy causes/nonprofits, then there are several websites out there channelling the funds, such as http://www.justgive.org, which is itself a nonprofit.