Smart & Wacky StartUp Ideas From Harvard

In some cases, students have put together interesting videos to introduce their products and services. One team, which has effectively used a YouTube video, is launching an iPhone app called SnapShop that allows a user to take a photo of a dress. The app then searches the Internet for the exact product and allows for its purchase from your iPhone.

And then there is Yenta, the new online matchmaking service that turns friends into Yentas who match them up with dates.

Not all of the entrepreneurial concepts may inspire, even though many are quite entertaining. As The Breakup Box team explains on its newly launched website, “We have had “many friends and loved ones go through difficult break-ups and have not always known the best way to express our condolences. To fix this problem, we created the Breakup Box to allow anyone to sympathize with their friends in a compassionate way and give them something to smile about.”

One HBS team is selling t-shirts to fellow students whose ideas entered Harvard’s “failed business track”

And not all of the teams were able to get their ideas off the ground by the school’s April 18th deadline. Those who didn’t quite make it, along with the teams that crash over the next few days, go into what Harvard is calling “failed business track” where they can spend the last four weeks of the semester doing an analytical autopsy on why their idea didn’t make it. One enterprising team at Harvard thought it would capitalize on failure by launching a business that sells t-shirts to the losing teams. The business is simply called “failed business track.”

As the group explains on its e-commerce website, “A lot of funny things happen to you at business college. We’re here to make those moments of hilarity, joy, and, well, embarrassment, permanent.”

Ouch.

DON’T MISS: HARVARD COAXES 150 STARTUP IDEAS FROM ITS MBA STUDENTS or HBS PREPS 900 FOR A MASSIVE GLOBAL INVASION