Amazing things happen when you fill a conference center with 600 innovators, entrepreneurs and community builders. The community has the opportunity to share experiences, learn and support one another. The power of many can always accomplish more than that of a few and this year’s Entrepreneur Expo hosted by TEDCO proved no different.

As Secretary Mike Gill said in his opening remarks, “Innovation happens from the ground up”. This is a powerful statement for a room full of doers who are all working to push their innovations into the market. US Colonel and @NASA Astronaut, Terry Virts (@AstroTerry), said in his Keynote address that one of the most important lessons learned through his career in space exploration and Aviation was to “listen to the crowd”. The crowd is most often right and will give you insights that no one person or small team could have seen by themselves. Colonel Virts lived this first hand at NASA where this practice of listening became an important part of their culture.

When Siavash Mahmoudian, CTO & CoFounder of Breezio, first developed Breezio’s technology he envisioned a platform with a simple concept - Learn to help - help to learn. The double meaning behind this is that the more you learn, the more you can teach which helps others to learn, “Learn to help”. Furthermore, “help to learn” implies that the more you help others to learn, the more you learn yourself. The output of a platform like Breezio is a collaborative learning environment that extends the learning continuum by increasing the number of potential teachers in proportion to the number of students. It’s a very simple concept that when applied to a crowd it exponentially increases the output of learning, innovation and results. Though our product just hit the market, I can imagine that this kind of crowd powered knowledge would have been useful for NASA and many other organizations who manage such large, critically important programs where many voices frequently aren't heard and missions fail as a result.

Please visit our site (www.breezio.com) and sign up for our newsletter, drop us a line or follow up on twitter (@brzio) to find out about how we are using crowd power to innovate research teams, educate the next generation of scientists, and build expert networks for your teams.