An idea is born somewhere relatively obscure (maybe in a garage somewhere), spreads to small communities of hardcore enthusiasts (like Kickstarter and Reddit), and sometime later takes the mainstream by surprise when it suddenly explodes into popularity.

The journey is familiar in the context of startups, but it applies to important ideas and technologies more broadly.

One example is bitcoin, which began as an interesting whitepaper published in 2008 that was circulated among cryptography experts for a few years before coming to the attention of the mainstream startup community. Now, it’s a cryptocurrency  — and blockchain protocol  — sensation where activity is being tracked closely and community splits are being chronicled by newspapers around the world

Is there a way to catch these ideas as they emerge, in their very early stages?It’s difficult, because the places where these sleeper trends begin are seemingly random and obscure.

WHERE NEW IDEAS ‘COME FROM’

Spotting these ideas has an element of serendipity and luck to it, but there are some things we can all do to improve our chances of finding an important trend before it hits the mainstream. The techniques aren’t different from what media and marketing “coolhunters” or trendspotters do to find pop culture trends early: It’s one part looking in the right places and cultivating the right sources, and one part noticing anomalies and acting quickly.

The places where sleeper trends begin are by definition unpredictable, so it’s important to cast a broad net among interesting discussion groups or hobbyist communities  — virtual or physical  —  that seem like good incubators for new ideas.

The next step is to keep track of what these groups are doing by setting up streams of information about them  —  anything from subscribing to newsletters and discovering good blogs in that space, to attending meetups and conferences.

One of the best ways to stay informed is by building a network of “social gateways”, people who are well connected in the communities you want to watch but that are also far enough outside your usual network that you are hearing about new things. Then, when a particularly compelling idea surfaces, you will hear about it early.

Some communities are far more likely to produce winning ideas than others. In his classic work The Diffusion of Innovations, sociologist Everett Rogers describes the characteristics of so-called “early adopters” – people who are more likely to find and use new technology.

These people are usually open-minded and scientific in their mindset, and have time or money to spend on trying new things. Any group with these characteristics is a good place for technologies to germinate, which is perhaps why college campuses make great testbeds for not only spotting but trying out new products.

The best groups of early adopters are extroverted and have lots of social ties, because the more connected they are, the faster new ideas spread through the group. This is why trends often start with young people in cities, rather than in sprawling suburban neighborhoods, even though the latter group may be just as willing to try out the same new things.

Highly connected groups can be either offline (densely populated cities or other clusters) or online (tight-knit online communities). A really good sign of such a highly connected group is one that has a newly formed, makeshift online presence, like a dedicated Slack channel or fast-growing subreddit (r/nameofgrouportopic). That usually means the group is both new and highly connected.

The number of small groups where ideas could surface is too large to watch them all, so it may be preferable to look further along the path, where ideas collect  —  in communities that aren’t very big, but have outsized importance or influence. The places to watch aren’t so much “gatekeepers” or curators of culture, like influential editors, as they are tastemakers.

SPOTTING AN IMPORTANT TREND

In the early days of a new idea, it’s often the case that nobody is paying for anything. One way of guessing at economic impact, is by looking at “proxy for demand”  —  how much people will pay for similar alternatives  —  and on the other side, looking at “proxy for supply” – how expensive something was to produce before.

But it’s still tricky, because it’s so hard to estimate the economic changes brought by a disruptive technology. It can be dangerous to dismiss or embrace trends solely for this reason.

Finally, while rapid exponential growth is a good sign, it’s not everything. Internet memes have huge growth as well. Most ideas that quickly attract a large audience are actually just fads, and it’s important to be able to pick out the important ones. One good sign is evidence of a “secret”, or some plausible reasoning why this idea couldn’t have manifested itself before now. With bitcoin, the secret is the technical breakthrough described in the bitcoin paper; where previous efforts at distributed trust and decentralized resourcing failed, it coupled bitcoin (incentives) with the blockchain protocol (distributed ledger) to solve those problems.

GOING MAINSTREAM

Having a breakthrough or a community of early adopters clearly isn’t enough. So how does one tell a trend  —  something that continues to spread  — from a fad  —  something that flares briefly and dies? The key is it needs to spread beyond the group of early adopters to the rest of the world, and there needs to be a real pathway for this to happen.

Before the internet, this path was from metropolitan centers, through the suburbs to the rest of the population. For ideas that spread purely online, the path could be through a big aggregator site like Reddit. Another pattern is spread by institutional similarity: Facebook was able to easily spread from Harvard to clusters of students in other schools, because of the structural similarity of most universities to each other despite other differences they may have.

Another path is by latching on to a different fast-growing community. In the 1990s, one of the big marketing successes of Sprite was advertising to the hip-hop subculture before it became mainstream. This type of path is especially important in technology, as subcultures that go through massive exponential growth are common. Targeting fast-growing communities is a common strategy for startups who want to see their user base grow.

Gaming has been a good example of an underrated community for the last few years  —  despite little prestige, it’s a surprisingly large and influential subculture, and gamers have been early adopters of ideas like livestreaming and VR.

And while in an ideal world, futurists could rationally deduce what the next big trend will be- , the reality is that these systems are complex and more fluid, change compounds and build on each other, and there are lots of unknown unknowns to account for.