T.S. Eliot once wrote, “Business today consists in persuading crowds.” As a society, we have reaped the benefits of crowd-based networks. Although we aren’t the first generation to be influenced by our peers, we are the first to directly harness its power to affect business in a multitude of ways. In a recent article for Virgin Entrepreneur, Sean Moffit (@SeanMoffit) offers a bird’s-eye view of the 14 things you need to know:  

Here are 14 pieces of the of crowd pie:

1. Crowd currencies: alternative currencies moderated in a decentralized and publicly-known way e.g. Bitcoin.

2. Peer-to-peer lending/commerce: direct social lending and commerce between people without a financial or retail middleman e.g. Lending Club, Etsy.

3. Equity based crowdfunding: members of the crowd become co-owners of the company, which raises funds in the form of shares and dividends e.g. Crowdcube.

4. Non-equity based crowdfunding: members donate money to a worthy cause and can redeem it as a “reward,” typically the product or service the crowdfunding company produces or provides e.g. StockShare.

5. Sharing economy: a collaborative economic model built around people sharing products and services including creation, production, trade and consumption by different people and organizations e.g. Airbnb, RVwithMe.

6. Customer co-creation: a group of customers and organizations partner up to produce mutually valued outcomes e.g. Lego Mindstorms, Threadless.

7. Social business: companies who emphasize genuine listening, sharing and participation through open social channels to create value throughout the corporation e.g. Dell, Betabrand.  

8. Crowd causes: individuals, non-profits or purpose-driven organizations, who engage with passionate stakeholders to raise the profile, impact and fundraising potential of their causes e.g. Charity Water.

9. Crowd tasks and creativity: obtaining labor, services, and ideas from geographically dispersed groups, typically online, instead of through traditional employees or suppliers e.g. Amazon mechanical Turk, Crowdspring, Freelancer.

10. Online communities: groups of individuals who participate on web-based platforms and interact ongoingly driven by a belief, idea, product, brand, cause, or business e.g. Reddit.

11. Mass collaboration: a form of collective action derived from many different people working towards a single project that produces shared knowledge e.g. Wikipedia.

12. Open innovation: use of inflows and outflows of information to accelerate innovation within organizations e.g. Nine Sigma, OpenIDEO.

13. Crowd intelligence: the shared intelligence and insight born from collaboration and/or competition e.g. Netflix, Quora, Kaggle.

14. Civic engagement: digitally-connected platforms to help organize and empower communities e.g. Code for America.

Technology has enabled the crowd economy to expand on a huge scale, but this movement is happening because of many factors occurring simultaneously: the rebellion against consumerism, new ways of making a living, and the awareness that business has a social impact and therefore, social responsibility. What this means for entrepreneurs and businesses is a deeper awareness on how to engage individuals and communities via mutual values. For everyone else, it means a sense of belonging to a global community less concerned with consuming and more concerned with being involved.