The business insider article on 20 most innovative startups was puzzling and inspiring at the same time. The choice of the title "most innovative" was puzzling - since the criteria for how they were selected was missing. Secondly, all the startups were from the US - I would be willing to bet that if you truly were going to look at 20 most innovative startups, then there perhaps - just perhaps may be some outside the US.
What was inspiring is that many of the startups did seem to have a fair amount of success and chance for continued growth. Some like H.Bloom may wilt over time and some like Taskrabbit may be cloned or reinvented into oblivion but there were others that seemed like they could give established players a run for the money.
I was particularly drawn towards those that seemed to offer a platform for enabling/accelerating innovation as opposed to a single innovation (admittedly Sphero was pretty cool). These platforms included
a) Kickstarter - permits anyone to be an angel investor (with checking account rates of return) in products that truly believe in.
b) Kaggle - Disseminates some fairly difficult problems to researchers around the world ; Kaggle is not the first to leverage crowd-sourced research; Innocentive has been doing it for a while. Their model however appears to be more democratic.
c) Skillshare - A platform for replicating the model of community-center courses but on an expanded scale. The students of ETR500 may want to check out this skillshare course on Business Model Generation
Others like Quora appear to leverage the networking ability of their founders and may still have a chance at developing into useful services. The ones looking at simplifying banking may have a better chance at profitability but they also carry significant risk.
Overall, the article had some good picks but also had a slight whiff of venture manure. Do sniff around, but carefully.
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