As we’ve noted before, entrepreneurs have made their money in a variety of ways. Some realize they can make a product better or cheaper than their competitors. Others spend years developing new technology that could potentially create new industries and generate billions of dollars. If this sounds far fetched, it’s happened before. J.P. Morgan helped create General Electric and made personal and commercial use of electricity possible. Steve Jobs took computers and put one in the pocket of nearly every person on the planet when he created the first smartphone.

Want to be next? The next world changing product could be yours, though it might take a few years of education and work, not to mention substantial capital investment.

The Best Products from the Next Entrepreneurs

If you can find the breakthroughs to make these technologies possible, your reward will be worldwide acclaim and untold fortunes.

Time Travel

Did you know that time travel is currently possible? Of course, it’s not exactly what people imagine and it’s not particularly useful. Also, we can only do it in space and we can only travel forward in time by fractions of a second. How is this possible? Well, I’m not going to pretend to understand it completely but astronauts in space, especially for longer duration missions lasting several months, do experience something known as time dilation. This is a consequence of Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, part of which states that time moves more slowly the closer you get to massive body. In the extreme, time appears to stop almost entirely as objects approach a black hole. The same is true of the earth. When astronauts leave the surface and orbit, time moves a little bit more quickly for them, in relation to our perspective. If this seems complicated, well, it is! But if you can harness the possibilities and create a meaningful use of time travel, the possibilities are endless. If you do manage to create time travel, please use your new found powers responsibly.

Synthetic Spider Silk

For many material scientists, a synthetic form of spider silk (one that is made through a manufacturing process rather than in nature) is seen as the Holy Grail. Though lightweight, natural spider silk has a stronger tensile strength than steel. This means that spider silk could potentially serve as a stronger alternative to steel or other metal cables. As a potential fabric, it could have a greater stopping power than Kevlar, which is used in bulletproof vests.

At this point, you might be wondering why people don’t just farm the silk from spiders like we do with various worms. The problem is that spiders don’t play nice with each other. If you put a bunch of spiders together, by the next day, only one spider will remain. While it is possible to “milk” a spider of silk, the process is long and tedious. As a result, chemists and biologists the world over are searching for ways to create a synthetic spider silk. Some teams are getting close too. One company, AMSilk, based out of Germany offers a line of products featuring its own version of spider silk but is still trying to work the material into commercial applications, such as clothing, bedding, and more.

The Ironman Suit

The brilliance of the Ironman suit has less to do with its weaponry and more to do with the arc reactor. The brilliant shining light on Tony Stark’s chest, the arc reactor represents an enormous leap forward for human technology in the Marvel universe. While a power source this small and portable seems more like science fiction, the arc reactor could become very real very soon. Scientists around the world are working on an arc fusion reactor that could output an astonishing amount of energy while being smaller than other designs. This new reactor was only proposed early this year and is still considered theoretical. The team behind the paper included researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan, among others. Does this mean we’ll one day see soldiers with Iron Man style armor? Probably not, but it does mean our cities will be cleaner and less polluted while energy costs decrease.