What if you could come up with an incredible breakthrough, but it would be totally dependent upon other people coming up with one or more breakthroughs? KickstarterPlus – for lack of a better name – would allow you to launch a Kickstarter-style project based on some existing Kickstarter project(s) which
haven’t fully reached fruition yet.
You could link or base your Kickstarter project on their Kickstarter project(s), and encourage supporters to fund both your project as well as the project(s) you’re depending upon.
In the existing Kickstarter approach, pledges will only be cashed in if the fund-raising target is reached. With the KickstarterPlus approach, your follow-on project can only cash in the pledges if your own fund-raising target is reached, with the added condition that the preceding Kickstarter project(s) must successfully come to fruition as well.
Another thing about the existing Kickstarter approach is that you can often get a discount on the product by putting in an early pledge. With the KickstarterPlus approach, you could get a discount on the follow-on product by putting in an early pledge on any of the project(s). You might even get a bigger discount by putting in early pledges on all projects.
And of course if the funds raised for your project exceed your target, then you have the discretion to re-allocate funds to the preceding project(s), should they need help reaching their targets.
I called it "KickstarterPlus" just to make it more understandable. The original names I was thinking of were "Techtree" (kind of like researching a tech tree in a RealTimeStrategy videogame), or possibly "E-Bayes" (as in Bayes Theorem).