I'm not limiting ideas to investing in an traditional since. I was thinking more along the lines of, I have 10k, how can I best leverage that 10k to make more money. For example:

I have some programming skills, so i make an iphone app spend 5k on development tools and then another 5k on advertising. Selling my app for $10 and trying to make 10,000 sales. I think 1-2 years is a reasonable timeframe for this. To me this is what business is all about. Finding a way to take a small amount of money, applying your skills and turning it into a larger sum.