I’d like to rent your (insert anything here).

“It’s really time to push the envelope” — Robin Chase

In a world of exponential scale where small problems can explode to grotesque consequences for all of us. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to also have some exponential solutions.

Fortunately, people like Robin Chase and Rachel Botsman are showing us the way to shift from living as the hyper consumption consumer, towards our saviour the “Shared Economy”.

Chase asks us: What if our entire economy were collaborative? We are all in the same ant hive here. If we want to survive in the world of exponential, we need too start adapting.

You have heard the saying that the strength of an individual is the team behind them. We have known since the beginning of time that we can do more together but somehow we designed our whole economy around individuals not communities.

What is the sharing economy?

Not easily defined that’s what it is. So I’ll use Nicolas Voisin’s dense but accurate description from his Medium Post:

The sharing economy is sometimes also referred to as the peer-to-peer economy, collaborative economy, collaborative consumption, the mesh, or — and here — the liquid and connected economy. Whatever the way you call it, this is a socio-economic system built around the sharing of human, intellectual and physical or corporate resources. It includes the shared creation, production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods and services by different people and organisations. These systems take a variety of forms, often leveraging information technology to empower individuals, corporations, nonprofits and government with information that enables distribution, sharing and reuse of excess capacity in goods and services. Got it?

Where do we start?

Two words: Excess capacity.

Take the car industry for example, over one billion cars strong. We spend thousands of dollars buying the car, then hundreds of dollars keeping fuel in it, for what though? Just so we can keep it sitting in our garage 23.5 hours a day.

“That’s a lot of cars doing a lot of nothing.”

Imagine the wasted potential of an Iphone 6s that could do what the phone was originally made for, to make and receive calls. Fortunately someone discovered the excess capacity, and created a platform for Apps. This is where companies like the following come in:

Carpooling.com, now running in over 40 countries, allows drivers to offer passengers a ride. According to company data, Carpooling.com transports one million people every month and has saved a million tons of carbon emissions.

Buzzcar.com , rent a car in your neighborhood at a great price, or list your car for rental for some extra income. The rentals are insured and secure.

Couchsurfing.com allows locals to host travelers in their homes, and now has more than five million members spanning every country in the world.
Shared networks trump traditional forms of corporate organization, every time. Because a shared network assets will always provide more greater value than a closed asset.

Let’s take a look at the value of these shared economy marketplaces.

• User investment costs decrease (think shared cars)
• Connects more diverse minds thus innovation. (think open source)
• User benefits increase & problems decrease (Etsy.com)
• Collaboration increases creativity (think instagram, flickr)
• Social well being increases (think change.org)
• easy access to pooled resources (kickstarter.com)

As Kevin Kelly puts it “Access is better than ownership.”

Esko Kilpi described the power of networks brilliantly in his essay on Medium, “The Future of Firms,”

“The existence of high transaction costs outside firms led to the emergence of the firm as we know it, and management as we know it….The reverse side of this argument is as important: If the (transaction) costs of exchanging value in the society at large go down drastically as is happening today, the form and logic of economic and organizational entities necessarily need to change! The core firm should now be small and agile, with a large network.

The mainstream firm, as we have known it, becomes the more expensive alternative. Accordingly, a very different kind of management is needed when coordination can be performed without intermediaries with the help of new technologies.

Today, we stand on the threshold of an economy where the familiar economic entities are becoming increasingly irrelevant. The Internet, and new Internet-based firms, rather than the traditional organizations, are becoming the most efficient means to create and exchange value.” — Esko Kilpi

Let’s put it that way the “collaboration economy” is for traditional firms what the asteroids were for dinosaurs, it’s simply an extinction-level event. Artificial intelligence is already here and it makes it possible to create totally new forms of economic entities, such as the “Uber for everything” — platforms/service markets that are being funded today. Tiny, agile firms can do things that in the past required behemoth organizations.

Experts are predicting that over $4 Billion will be invested in excess capacity businesses globally next year. The sharing economy is here and it’s disrupting everything, mainstream industries that aren’t on board are the dinosaurs looking at the sky falling down.

Right now, 80% of the things in our houses are used less than once a month, and self-storage is booming.

So take a look around you, where is the excess capacity. What food are you throwing away? What tickets are you not going to use but can’t get a refund? What power tools do you never use? What’s in your self storage? How about those snow skis you have not used in 5 years.

I’d like rent your (insert your anything here).

Thanks for reading.
Izac Yeaman