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by NPR
Latest Business Ideas
Auction-Based Spectrum Trading Platform
The podcast explains a complex auction system designed to reallocate TV frequencies in the U.S. to make room for cell phone usage. This system involved simultaneous bidding from both telecom companies and TV station owners, creating a two-sided market for spectrum trading. Entrepreneurs could take inspiration from this model to create an online auction platform that facilitates the sale and trade of digital assets or licenses in various sectors, such as software licenses or domain names. By implementing a two-sided auction system, the platform could enhance transparency and competition, allowing sellers to get the best possible prices while buyers can acquire resources efficiently. This model could be particularly appealing in sectors where assets are limited and demand fluctuates significantly.
From: Summer School 6: When the markets need a designer
Transferable Quota System for Fisheries
The podcast discusses a successful shift from a time-limited fishing derby to a transferable quota system in Alaska's fisheries. This system guarantees fishermen a set amount of fish for the season, allowing them to fish at their leisure rather than in a high-pressure race. This approach not only enhances safety by allowing fishermen to choose better weather conditions but also promotes sustainable fishing practices. For digital entrepreneurs, this model could be adapted into a marketplace platform where quotas can be traded among fishermen, enabling them to buy, sell, or lease their fishing rights. This ensures an efficient allocation of resources and promotes safety, as fishermen can make more informed decisions about when and how to fish.
From: Summer School 6: When the markets need a designer
Independent Statistical Audit & Validation Service
Drawing from the Greece story, this idea is to offer an external validation and forensic-statistics service that helps public institutions, international bodies, and donors verify, reconcile, and reestablish credible official statistics. In Greece the incoming finance team assembled a broad cast of revenue, expenditure, statistical office, and central bank personnel and relied on external statistical teams to reconstruct the true deficit. An entrepreneurial team could package that capability as a service: deploy statisticians and forensic accountants, provide tooling to reconcile ledgers (payments, receipts, pension obligations), run reproducible reconciliations, produce validated audit reports, and offer a remediation plan and public verification statement. Target clients include national statistical agencies seeking credibility, finance ministries, international organizations (EU, IMF), and donor-funded transparency programs. Implementation requires recruiting experienced statisticians and auditors, developing secure data ingestion and reconciliation software, and building a proof-of-work methodology that external validators accept. Revenue would come from contracted audits, multi-month consulting engagements, and longer-term validation retainers. The episode’s account that external validation and European agencies were central to uncooking Greece’s books is direct evidence this service is relevant and needed when trust has been lost.
From: What happens when governments cook the books
Statistical Integrity Monitoring Service
The episode repeatedly raises the problem of detecting subtle manipulation or degradation of official statistics and notes that change detection is tricky for outsiders. This idea is to build an automated monitoring platform that continuously compares official releases (jobs reports, CPI, deficit figures) against alternative data sources—web-scraped price indices, private economic indicators, central bank releases, and other third-party datasets—to detect anomalies, structural breaks, or suspicious methodological changes. The platform would ingest official releases (PDFs, bulletin feeds), alternative indices (web-scraped prices, private indices like Alberto’s supermarket index), and apply change-point detection, outlier analysis, and rule-based checks (e.g., sudden removal of published sub-indices or methodology changes). The service targets journalists, NGOs, think tanks, institutional investors, and civic tech groups who need automated alerts when numbers diverge materially from expectation. Implementation tactics include building a reproducible pipeline, transparency counters (publish comparison tables and methodology), alerting via email/Slack, and a public-facing dashboard showing divergence scores and historical context. The episode’s discussion that private indices already make manipulation harder provides supporting evidence: this product packages and scales that watchdog effect for paying users via subscription.
From: What happens when governments cook the books
Web-scraped Supermarket Inflation Index
This idea is to build an independent, web-scraped price index (often called a supermarket index in the episode) that tracks consumer-price movements using retail website prices rather than relying on official CPI releases. Alberto Cavallo scraped major online grocery stores in Argentina to create a supermarket index that revealed true inflation levels when the official agency's numbers were suspect. A digital entrepreneur could implement this by identifying representative product baskets, mapping those products to a CPI-like category list, and continuously scraping prices from major online retailers and supermarkets. The engineering stack would include scraping frameworks (Playwright/Selenium/requests + parsers), a data pipeline (ETL), time-series storage (InfluxDB/Postgres), basic weighting to approximate official baskets, and a front-end dashboard or API to publish the index and historical series. This product solves information asymmetry when official statistics are delayed, opaque, or distrusted—useful to journalists, local businesses, investors, economists, and empowered consumers who need timely price signals. Tactics mentioned in the episode that should be followed include matching the government’s supermarket-type categories so comparisons are meaningful, publishing methodology for transparency, and scaling across countries (Alberto did this for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela). Monetization can be via subscription access to dashboards/APIs, licensing to research firms, sponsored country reports, or a freemium model where basic indices are free and detailed sector-level data is paid.
From: What happens when governments cook the books
Recent Episodes
What happens when governments cook the books
Host: Sally Helm and Mary Childs
3 ideas found
Summer School 5: The many ways governments influence industry
Host: Robert Smith
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