I am not ashamed to say that the title of this first blog post is taken directly from one of my favorite books, "The wisdom of crowds", by James Surowiecki. The first time I read the book was in 2004 when I lived in the UK for a few years. Although I have often thought of it as one of my favorite books, it wasn't until recently that I realized how truthful it really was.

James Surowiecki argues in the book that the collective wisdom of the many average people will always be smarter and come to a better conclusion than a few experts. This fact, he proves, is true in everything from stock market movements, to finding lost submarines, to guessing the weight of a cow, or in solving other challenging questions.

But let's pause that thought here and jump forward a little bit in time. Because this book wasn't really the start of the journey that we've embarked on, but rather part of the solution to a bigger problem I stumbled upon.

As so many other ideas arise, ours also began with a failed attempt to work on another idea. I had started a fun evening project with my wife when Covid-19 hit the world economy and forced us to pull the handbrake. During an evening walk in April, when the bleak world outlook and general uncertainty were all around us, we discussed the challenges we faced and all the alternative solutions that didn't work. We realized pretty soon that we were not only limited by time (both worked full-time jobs) but also by resources, knowledge and networks. Although we really believed in the idea, the risk factor of the investment in relation to any potential profit was suddenly too great for a perfectly ordinary family to handle under these special circumstances.

What annoyed me the most was that this wasn't the first time I'd had ideas, but where I lacked enough courage, time, knowledge or network to take it from just an idea to something more. I realized pretty quickly that the problem of being alone with one's ideas was by far the biggest obstacle to push the idea forward. If this was true for me, I became convinced that it must be true for many other people around the world. How frustrating isn't that?

This led me to ask some more of the important questions.

How many good ideas have been lost, just because we were afraid to talk about things we didn't fully understand, because we didn't have time to work on them alone, or because we simply couldn't solve all the questions ourselves? How many ideas do we think of every day and how many ideas can become something more than just an idea? What if all ideas were instead connected with more people, who together could solve the great challenge of pushing an idea over the threshold of being just an idea?!

If you've read this far, I think most people realize that they've all had many ideas that ended up being just a thought. Regardless of whether the ideas were small or big, we are talking about an extremely large number of ideas that never materialized. Lots of ideas that could have become something more than just ideas if the right circumstances had existed. Some of these ideas could have made this world very different and possibly even much better by creating businesses, jobs, innovative products, services and much, much more.

To tie it back to the beginning of this blog, it became clear to me that the outcome of any idea will always be better by collaborating with many ordinary people, rather than doing or thinking about everything myself. This is why feedback and engagement from multiple people is so extremely important and why the knowledge of many average people will always be better than the few experts that you might normally have asked for feedback, at least if James Surowiecki is to be believed.

In any case, I am convinced that "The wisdom of the crowds", will prove to be correct again and again - not to say the least now, when we've launch the new social network Bay of Ideas.

I am humbled and grateful to have Robert and Jonas with me as co-founders of Bay of Ideas and who have also had the knowledge to build the initial platform needed to start this. Our collective work and diverse skills are the start of a new journey that will ultimately lead to more ideas becoming reality and hopefully a better future for many more.

Bay of Ideas' mission is to let people publish all their ideas in the easiest way possible in multiple layers of visibility, and connect them with the collective knowledge of the crowd to develop each idea into something more than just an idea. All ideas, big or small, early or developed, are welcome at Bay of Ideas, whether it's starting a restaurant, improving a tool, developing a service or something really futuristic. But most importantly, this is the place where collaboration can be found and ideas grow big.

Make the world a little better and post your idea too!

Andy