Boston-based startup IAMScientist hopes to apply the crowd-funding approach pioneered by Kickstarter to research funding.
The company has already enjoyed modest success as a matchmaking service for companies and scientists. For a fee, it will tap its network of researchers—mainly in medicine and the life sciences—to find an available expert in a specific research area. But IAMScientist recently started allowing users to advertise projects for others to fund as well.
The approach is analogous to Kickstarter, a website that has raised almost $100 million for a wide range of entrepreneurial projects in 2011. But, of course, there’s a big difference: it’s unclear if IAMScientist’s audience of scientific researchers will want to contribute their own funds towards other researcher’s projects.
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