There are examples of legit ICOs doing something other than make the creators rich. However, you need to do some real deep research to really know what you're getting your money into. Learn about smart contracts and Ethereum and make informed decisions about your purchases. It's far to easy to get scammed and really make costly mistakes without knowing it, if you blindly accept every ICO for their word.
ICOs are not really new, in concept, since they play off of IPOs which stands for Initial Public Offering. But they are new in the sense they deal with cryptocurrency, smart contracts, DAO which stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. And these are really how the future of business will operate, due to it's flexibility and lack of centralized corruption to muddy the overall objective that founded the buisness model. A whole new horizon of decentralized business is opening up and we are the test pilots and engineers. Together we can do wonderious things, we just need to highlight the problem spots so the wonderious stay that way.