Benefits of Community and Crowd

Why are Community and Crowd so important to an ExO? Because they add value to an organization. How? Because they tap the world’s surplus cognitive capacity.

No company, no matter how large, employs more than a minute fraction of the world’s most brilliant minds. Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, famously said, “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” Moreover, those talented experts are scattered around the planet, and most don’t have the time or interest in working for you. 

That’s why ExOs cultivate their own Communities. A company can have some of the best developers and data scientists on its payroll—but nothing beats a large, engaged Community. 

Similarly, machine-learning models rely on large datasets, which are not easy to find. The Kaggle Community finds them. Kaggle offers many open datasets to build, train, and test machine-learning models. Community members can share solutions and be ranked according to their results. They can also participate in data competitions with cash prizes for winning solutions.

An Exo’s Community of loyal users and fans is similarly valuable for product development, alpha testing, word-of-mouth marketing, and other business. The Apple iPhone community—given its size and complexity, it might more accurately be called a “universe”—serves the company as a sounding board, conscience, expert consultant, field tester, app designer, and a huge and steady purchasing audience that not only helps the company determine future Apple product models and upgrades but then all-but guarantees the commercial success of those offerings.

Some other benefits of Community and Crowd include:

• Creating new intellectual property. From game characters on Roblox and Axi Infinity to news postings on Reddit and Facebook, Community creates content that is used to engage other members.

• Generating data. Community and crowd-generated data that can be used by an organization’s Algorithms and AI to create further value—for example, identifying and developing new markets. Fitbit and Nest are two examples.

• Supporting interactions that can help build an organization’s products or services. The act of engaging with an organization—through platforms like Wikipedia, Reddit, or GitHub—often ends up building products and/or services.

• Marketing support by promoting the company at no cost to friends and prospective customers.

• Creating comradery and connection that keep members coming back to engage with their friends. Peloton is a good example.

• Value for acquisition. A robust Community can act as a value multiplier, making a young company particularly appealing for acquisition. Indeed, the Community itself has its own value. In January 2021, for example, Fitbit was acquired by Google at a valuation of $2.1 billion, most of which accounted for the company’s user roles and data. 

• Gathering knowledge. For ExOs, Communities become a powerful means to gather, curate, and store knowledge for later use.