Is There a Way to Use the Network Effect in the Classroom?

Can you think of any ways in which a startup could strongly leverage the network effect? Like, for example, could a platform that uses the mnemonic medium to help people remember ideas from books create a network effect by enabling its users to see the prompts that other users have written about the same book. The public goods problem is basically that if you invent an unusual novel interface, that is often fairly costly for you, but very cheap for someone else to steal. It's difficult to capture the value that you create when doing this.