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1. Reward list. Most money for research gets won by people who propose to look into something. That is OK. But for me there is something neater about the prizes offered to people who have already performed. There are lots of prizes and bounties out there but it can be difficult to find one for you. (If I could win any that I know about I think it would be the P=NP? prize.) I think it would be neat to collect all such prizes in some ordered format and make them available to everyone.
2. Bounty site. This is pretty similar but instead of going out to search for prizes that already exist you provide a listing service to invite bounties to be offered. (I'll pay $10 for every pound of scrap metal. $50 for each joke that can make my boss laugh out loud. Ten percent of the pick for every cherry tree that you pluck clean.)
3. Reverse E-bay How about a place where you describe the job you want done and take bids. The best value-bidder wins. It's not as simple as Ebay because there can be a lot more than price that might go into the value equation. Unless you can make the product requested very specific.
4. T-shirt logo contest. Get entries focused on a theme from high school art classes all over the place. Best entries get made, marketed, and sold and the submitters get a share. (Thanks Gina!) (I like this as a promotion for another business as well.)
5. Dust. Optical and nano labs work better if they are super clean. There are now several vacuum systems and other systems that clean about 99% of the dust out of the air. Put a few in series and you could get very high purity in the output air. The attractive thing here is the price differential between products intended for households that are sold in the store and products intended for the lab.
6. Patent rehash. So you have a concept and you want to see if it's been done before. You go to the US patent office. And you research. And research some more. And then a little bit more. At the end you think that maybe you have something new. But all this time you have been searching around rather than being productive. Either that or you have forked it over for an expert to do the work for you. There has to be a better interface to this vital information. The patent office doesn't have a huge incentive to provide it. The lawers benefit from a bad interface because it makes their job more difficult and specialized. The rest of us could use a better system. I think many would pay a reasonable fee for a better system. Especially if it had a google alert feature notifying the user of all patents that pass that are related to particular areas. Also, reading patents can be a vital way to come up with new and better ideas of your own. A nice system for finding relevant patents would speed research.
7. Pig slop. Stores need something to do with their produce as it goes bad. I think they trash it which is a waste. Why not gather it from all the stores and restaurants and feed it to pigs and chickens?
8. Yard drive. In Provo they have a program where once or twice a year the city collects yard trash. Branches, leaves, grass, etc. Then they compost it. They sell the compost and actually make a profit for the city. We need that in Albuquerque.