The Harvard Business School recently published an online newsletter detailing what some of their 2010 graduates had been doing since leaving the university.
Expecting to see a report full of zany products that had been created a la "Dragon's Den", I was pleasantly surprised to see how community minded the graduates have been.
It seems to be an entreprenurial trend for new businesses to create platforms via which their customers can contribute to their contemporaries' lives, and vice versa.
It also happens to make complete sense, of course, especially within the current worldwide economic context. This new breed of company will create, "stronger...smarter communities...driven by capitalistic principles", so says Shelby Clark, co-founder of RelayRides.com.
In other words, people provide a product or service that is mega convenient for the consumer, and in return they are financially rewarded - no big corporation to snatch your hard earned money, and a happier, more organic community as a result.
In conjunction with existing social networking setups, these business models have the potential to thrive, and perhaps even stretch further than the immediate vicinity that many of them seem to concentrate on...could it be long before we have a culture/nation-transcending community based on "helping a brother out"? Probably, is the answer; it may not happen, but it's an idealist's dream.
Check out the newsletter here: http://media.www.harbus.org/media/storage/paper343/news/2010/09/27/News/The-Entrepreneurial.Class-3936514.shtml It makes for interesting reading.
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