Startup Idea : Connecting businesses with a community of experts

We started with a few basic observations regarding the consulting industry : - Large companies have increasing expectations towards consulting firms and are looking more and more for specialized experts rather than general practitioners - Small and medium businesses are not familiar with consulting services because they are too expensive and too far away from the operational expertise they need - Given the cost structure of consulting firms, there is no profitability for them to target the SME - Expertise is today spread out around a lot of small actors : freelancers, lateral thinkers, entrepreneurs, researchers, students… Starting from these observations, we tried to figure out a new business model, connecting SME top managers with a community of experts, freelancers and “lateral thinkers”, working together in a collaborative way. Compared to traditional consulting firms, the objective was to do : - BETTER through the collective intelligence of the community - FASTER through a step-by-step process going from elaborating the strategy to implementing it - and CHEAPER through the disintermediation of consulting firms