Tap into the Exponential Power of the Crowd

Tap into the Exponential Power of the CrowdTap into the Exponential Power of the CrowdTap into the Exponential Power of the Crowd H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, authors of BOLD How to Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World (Simon Schuster, 2015)Until very recently, grand business challenges were off-limits to most mortals. The issue was scale and the fact that scale has always been a pay-to-play proposition.Historically, going big meant huge capital outlays and multi-decade bets. It meant arms and legs in dozens, sometimes hundreds, of countries. It also meant an astounding array of talent, the infrastructure to hire that talent, retain that talent, and as the technology evolved retrain that talent.But with the array of exponential crowd tools available to todays entrepreneur, the entire playing field has shifted.Today, incredibly, the ability to play at scale is never more than a few mouse clicks away.Tap the Power of the CrowdHere in the twenty-first century, business is a bout exponential possibilities. Unlike the previous century, the skills required to unlock ansicht possibilities are not the hard skills of yore, but rather the soft skills of understanding how to tap into these crowd-powered resources and use them effectively.Mastering tools like crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, incentive competitions, and the potency of a properly built community is becoming essential.Our motivation in writing BOLD Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World, was to create a resource on the use of emerging technologies, thinking at scale, and mining the awesome power of crowd-powered tools. These exponential advantages empower entrepreneurs like never before.These tools are exponential in power for three simple reasons1)The Crowd is Growing. Over the next decade, the size of the crowd (those folks online) is expected to more than double from roughly 2 billion to 5 billion people (perhaps 7 billion if some of the orbital or stratospheric communication solutions are dep loyed). This means 3 billion new minds are about to join the global conversation (this is the group referred to in our previous book, Abundance, as the rising billion).2)Technologies are Growing. The communication technologies underpinning the crowd are growing exponentially, morphing once thin data connections into ubiquitous broadband. The multinational professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers projects that the penetration of mobile (broadband) Internet services will reach 54 percent of the worlds population by the end of 2017. As a result, the crowd is becoming hyper-connected and hyper-responsive.3)Accessibility is Expanding. Perhaps most important, all of the exponential technologies are starting to become easily accessible to the masses, further empowering this hyper-connected, hyper-responsive crowd. What this means is that the people you can now tap for support are themselves far more capable than ever before.For existing businesses to tap these resources, it is imp ortant to keep these six things in mind1. The only constant is change.2. The rate of change is increasing.3. If you dont disrupt yourself, someone else will.4. Competition and disruption are no longer coming from some multinational company overseas. Theyre now originating from the guy or gal in a start-up garage beschirrunging exponential technologies.5. Given Bill Joys famous comment, No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else, how do you tap into these individuals?6. If youre dependent upon innovationonly from within your company, you are dead. You must harness the crowd to remain competitive.Building your CommunitySo how many members do you actually need to build an online community? Less than you probably think. Heres how to get startedBe the First Mover. It seems obvious, but being the first one into any space gives you considerable leverage. If people want to have a conversation and your community is the only place to have it, youre already winnin g. If you cant be first mover in a space, then the problem youre here to tackle better be significantly different and arguably more vorstellungary than the competitions.Handpick Early Members. Research shows your early adopters tend to become your most ardent supporters. Get the ball rolling by personally handpicking your first ten to fifteen members. Be sure to engage these folks in the community-building process. Ask for their advice. Integrate their input. Dont waste your time going after big names. As a general rule, these folks are busy with their own communities.Establish a Newcomers Ritual. You want to give members a way to feel like they belong but they have to earn it. Create a ritual and tie it to a specific membership milestone. After a new member has their fifth blog post or one of their comments draws ten likes on Facebook, reward that level of participation with a token.Listen. No matter what your core vision is, you cant get anywhere without your members. So pay atte ntion to what they have to say and be prepared to change direction when necessary.Todays exponential entrepreneurs have at their disposal more than enough power, as Steve Jobs famously said, to put a ding in the universe. Billion-dollar companies are being built faster than ever, and trillion-dollar industries are on their way.More than ever, it isnt the hard skills that will set these entrepreneurs apart, but their ability to tap into the exponential power of the crowd.Parts of this article were adapted from BOLD How to Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler. Copyright 2015 by PHD Ventures. Reprinted by permission of Simon Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Author BiosPeter H. Diamandis is a New York Times-bestselling author and the founder of more than 15 high-tech companies. He is the CEO of the XPRIZE, executive chairman of the Singularity University, a Silicon Valley-based institution backed by Google, 3-D Systems and NASA.Steven Kotler is a New York Times-bestselling author, award-winning journalist and the cofounder and director of research for the Flow Genome Project. His books include The Rise of Superman and Abundance.