Kickstarter has just hit the UK, but there are now a host of crowdfunding startups that focus on business creation and innovation

There was a notable buzz among techie and creative types last month as Kickstarter, the US-based leading proponent of crowdfunding, well, kickstarted its new UK operation. Entrepreneurs, artists and other groups with big ideas but small budgets polished up their business plans and online elevator pitches in the hope that the Kickstarter community would pony up enough funds to get their ventures started.

In the upstart world of social media, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding have already established themselves as two of the most disruptive and creative forces at work. Understanding the wisdom and motivation of the crowd has become a skill not just needed by social studies students but also by marketing managers, recruitment specialists and sales and R&D teams.

That appreciation of collective knowledge and power also turns out to be pretty useful when it comes to launching new creative and technology ventures.

That's where sites like Kickstarter come in. By asking the crowd to judge the value of startup business and creative visions, entrepreneurs and artists put their faith in a peer-to-peer funding model that promises transparency and a sense of community for both funder and fundee.

Sounds like the perfect model for sustainability projects doesn't it? That's certainly the view taken by new start-up crowdfunding sites FundaGeek, RocketHub and MedStartr, all geared to providing bespoke crowdfunding support for life sciences, sustainability and medical research ventures that are not covered by Kickstarter.

Of course, crowd and microfunding projects are nothing new in the social cause community. Kiva has been enabling developing world entrepreneurship through microloans since 2005 while the Grameen Foundation pioneered microfinance for poor families. In recent years a host of cause-related crowdfunding sties have sprung up, most like JustGiving, Causes.com and Razoo aimed at helping individuals raise sponsorship money for charity events. Spacehive helps fund public spaces.

Some companies have also tapped into the crowdfunding model. BBVA's Friends and Family programme, as the name suggests, provides a microlending platform for Spanish communities.

But until recently, crowdfunding hadn't really been applied to creating businesses and sparking innovation around the triple bottom line of sustainability – people, planet, profit.

Kickstarter became a success because it spotted a big gap in the new disruptive creative industries market. The explosion of online and social media challenged the traditional business models in the music, film and publishing. In turn, and counterproductively, those industries became even more risk-averse preferring to puts their faith in supposed guaranteed blockbusters rather than invest and nurture innovative artists and performers.

Kickstarter has provided a model for that innovation and creativity to flourish, and its success is based in no small part on its "all or nothing" rules for funding; if a project's stated funding goal isn't met in the time given to raise the money then none of the prospective funders are charged and the project doesn't receive any funds. This makes entrepreneurs and creative groups think twice about asking for too much funding and protects (to a certain extent) the funders from throwing money at projects that will never come to fruition.

But the all or nothing model isn't perfect for all types of research projects, especially if the research being undertaken is for say a medical research, biotech or green tech project that is still years away from becoming a marketable product. That's why FundaGeek, which is aimed at crowdfunding technology and scientific projects at universities and research institutions, offers both all or nothing funding for commercial ventures and partial, incremental funding for non-profit oriented research projects.

RocketHub, for its part, offers a lot of the same opportunities that Kickstarter does but with a strong science bent, hence projects with titles like "do tiny microbes in the soil help marine trees get established?" and "changing the face of farming." RocketHub also offers a "launchpad" for new promising ventures that are voted up or down the funding ladder by a combination of the RocketHub executive team, the site's Facebook community and a rotating group of guest judges.

Then there's MedStartr, the recently launched crowdfunding site for medical innovation that was founded in part because one of its founder's funding ventures didn't fit the categories Kickstarter looks to support. Covering innovation around areas such as infectious disease, rheumatoid arthritis and breast cancer, MedStartr is hoping to provide a platform for the many stakeholders – patients, friends and family, medical professionals, researchers and entrepreneurs – who want to drive innovation, disruption and new breakthroughs in the healthcare space.

MedStartr and other social sites dedicated to health, medicine and pharmaceuticals will always have to navigate around the strict regulations established to protect patients. Yet, in time MedStartr could fund new medical devices and apps, new clinical practices and research areas of expertise, drug development or even infrastructure needs for hospitals and clinics.

By putting the power of innovation and decision making in the hands of an invested (in all senses of the word) crowd, these new life science and health-focused sites could yet shake up the healthcare sector in the same way sites like Kickstarter have done to the creative industries.

Matthew Yeomans is the co-founder of Social Media Influence and director of Custom Communication, a social media sustainability consultancy

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