Apply It

Apply It

New business ideas

Social capital audit tool for SMEs

Click to reveal
New business ideas

Build a paid diagnostic software tool that helps SME owners map and score their trust networks, reciprocity patterns, and shared values across stakeholders — the three core attributes the paper identifies as constituting social capital. The tool could generate a visual 'social capital health score' and flag network gaps that leave the business exposed during crises. Target accountants, business advisors, and bank SME relationship managers as reseller channels, since they already conduct financial health checks with the same client base.

New business ideas

Polycrisis readiness retainer for hospitality micro-businesses

Click to reveal
New business ideas

Launch a fractional 'crisis social capital' advisory retainer specifically for catering and hospitality micro-businesses — one of the sectors directly studied in the paper — who lack in-house strategic capacity. The paper argues that SMEs in this bracket are first to feel polycrisis pressures like rising fuel and rental costs, yet least able to convert operational reactions into strategic opportunities. The retainer would focus exclusively on pre-building the informal network integrations the paper identifies as buffers, not on generic business planning.

New business ideas

Cross-sector SME network brokerage subscription

Click to reveal
New business ideas

Create a paid membership platform that deliberately connects SMEs across unrelated industries — mirroring the paper's cross-sectoral sampling design — so members can access the 'value forms' the paper defines as groups and relationships beyond current direct economic interaction that offer future economic benefit. The paper finds that inclusion in wider informal networks is a decisive advantage during crises, so the platform's core value proposition is engineering those inclusions before a crisis arrives. Revenue comes from tiered subscriptions, with premium tiers granting access to sector-spanning introductions curated by human brokers.

New business ideas

Longitudinal benchmarking service for SME resilience investors

Click to reveal
New business ideas

Offer a longitudinal social capital benchmarking product to impact investors and regional development funds that back SME portfolios, providing two-wave assessments twelve months apart — the same methodological design the paper used — to measure whether investee companies are building or eroding trust, reciprocity, and shared values over time. The paper's findings show that social capital is often ignored during 'normality' and only recognised as crucial mid-crisis, so selling early-warning intelligence to investors gives them a non-financial lead indicator of portfolio risk. Pricing could be per-cohort, bundled with existing due diligence packages.

New business ideas

Reactive-to-strategic digital transformation sprint product

Click to reveal
New business ideas

Design a structured 90-day consulting sprint that converts a crisis-era digital quick-fix — the paper cites SMEs adopting card machines without integrating back-end accounting or procurement — into a full strategic digitalisation. The paper explicitly warns that reactive change yields only marginal benefit when it is not strategic, making the 'incomplete digital pivot' a commercially identifiable and widespread SME pain point. Package the sprint as a fixed-fee productised service sold through accountancy firms and point-of-sale hardware resellers who already have relationships with the small retailers who made exactly these partial changes during COVID-19.

New business ideas

Shared-values onboarding platform for SME supply chains

Click to reveal
New business ideas

Build a B2B SaaS tool that helps SMEs vet and onboard suppliers using shared-values alignment scoring alongside traditional financial checks, directly operationalising the paper's finding that shared values are a foundational attribute of resilience-enabling social capital. The paper notes that UK SMEs struggled acutely with EU supply chain disruption post-Brexit, suggesting that value-alignment — not just cost — is a supply chain resilience factor worth systematising. The platform could integrate with existing procurement tools and generate a 'social capital compatibility' report for each prospective supplier relationship.