We help small, emerging businesses solve BIG challenges. By helping small companies solve wicked problems posed by larger and more established organizations, we can increase the impact of the $70+ billion and 10 billion man hours entrepreneurs invest every year trying to get companies off the ground.

Large organizations often times find themselves relying on a small network of select contacts (e.g. advisors, vendors, key employees) to scan the market for innovative companies that can offer viable solutions to their business issues, limiting the scope and breadth of targets and often ignoring entrepreneurs without access to such "referral" network.

Our goal is to bypass the "referral" network and use the power of the internet and open innovation to connect entrepreneurs in any part of the world (from any background, religion, country) directly to organizations that are willing to address key business imperatives by making resources (e.g. cash and other assets like distribution networks, brand, etc.) available to entrepreneurial ventures for the implementation of their solutions.

Problem

Most established organizations must rely on acquisitions and/or partnerships to maintain their rate of growth. However, the process for finding suitable candidates is inefficient, as it relies heavily on the formation of ad-hoc networks, professional connections and good timing to yield positive results. This process results in over 13,000 documented M&A transactions every year in the U.S. alone. We estimate that there may be at least 3x more transactions that could be conceived if this inefficiency is addressed.

Solution

Our solution is to use technology to a) give all entrepreneurs equal access to opportunities, b) allow people to leverage their social networks to enable meaningful connections by referring applicants to a sponsor's challenge and c) provide the challenge sponsor with an organized process with the potential to yield multiple options within a specific time frame. Everyone on the web can create an account and submit to opportunities. We don't limit by any criteria. All selection is driven by the challenge sponsors.

Example

StartupBlvd uses a combination of social networking, challenge-based initiatives, and a robust diligence process to create a novel and efficient global innovation solution. The platform we are developing allows maturing organizations to express their business challenges through social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn; bloggers and other relevant online properties. For example, a major city in our state will post a challenge about helping small, neighborhood-based businesses use social media tools to drive loyal traffic and customers into their stores. Any entrepreneur around the world can review posted challenges and submit their company for consideration. Once someone submits their company, they undergo a light diligence process to quickly determine if they match to the challenge's requirements. This is very similar to what Ashoka did with the ChangeMakers project. The outcome of our process is straightforward: Selected entrepreneurs will get a deal in which the city will provide significant non-cash resources to help the entrepreneurial venture gain a quick foothold in the city's small business market.

Marketplace

Our competition includes a mix of large companies like innocentive.com and mergerid.com to smaller ones like angel.co. However, we believe our approach uniquely combines various elements of job-posting, M&A deal processing and social media to create a defensible and sustainable competitive position. The main challenge we face is our own execution and timing, as there may be companies with more resources who can view our approach and reverse engineer a similar solution that could compete against us. However, given the large size of the market, it is unlikely that few companies will dominate, just as Ashoka does not dominate the market for non-profit challenges (just go to challengepost.com)