Underutilized Assets and Excess Capacity: Much More than Just Wasted Value
Your Capital Asset.
“from the sharing economy to the infonomic business gap”
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?
A common premise is that when information about goods is shared, the value of those goods may increase, for the business, for individuals, and for the community. This is true. But what about corporate assets? Did the sharing economy miss here a big point? All the well known examples you can find are about people and individuals assets, as cars (blablacar, uber, etc…), houses or goods (airbnb and friends…). Do Companies, from startups to large corps, will embrace and benefit from the liquid sharing economy — at least?
In 2011, collaborative consumption was named one of TIME Magazine’s 10 ideas that will change the world. It does. The financial crisis of 2007–2010 and subsequent housing bubbles have prompted consumers to reconnect through peer-to-peer marketplaces that turn underutilized assets and resources into new jobs, income streams, growth alternative and community networks. In a pre-historic era, Napster pioneered peer-to-peer file sharing and subsequent platforms have emerged to facilitate the sharing of content, cars, bikes, tools and random household appliances.
Let’s make a jump in 2014. Where is the Napster for tangible and intangible business assets? What does the unicorns’ experience teach us about the opportunity of an underutilized corporate assets marketplace in the global liquid world? From an innovative idea to the failure of its enterprise, at any moment, and especially for big companies that need to make their assets sweat, or innovative startups during a Pivot, such a tool could be resourceful, and much more — a matter of life when it’s not just an added value question.
Someone calls the missing part of this Lego “Infonomics”: the theory, study and discipline of asserting economic significance to information. Mehdi wrote something about information asymmetry recently — you must read it. Infonomics and its asymmetry, provide the framework for businesses to value, manage and wield information as a real asset. It endeavors to apply both economic and asset management principles and practices to the valuation, handling and deployment of information assets. Someone also asks for an infomediary that could make the magic happen between the need and the want — we will talk about this. Better: this is what we’re now talking about.
Infonomics valuation exercises typically disclose that information is a vastly underutilized asset and those organizations should consider opportunities to improve their capture and deployment of information in generating top-line and bottom-line benefits. So… What if all the business data, offer, demand — from patents to real estate — were at least available, well indexed as Google did for the Internet’s noise, with direct contact to any business owners, as Facebook did for your ‘wanna-be-friend’? This could provide awesome decision-making data, helping business processes at any stage, giving opportunity for more innovation sharing and swap ; and even, giving option in the quest for a real, strong, ROI.
We’re talking about your capital asset. It is defined to include property of any kind held by an assessee, whether connected with his business or profession or not connected with his business or profession. It includes all kinds of property, movable or immovable, tangible or intangible, fixed or circulating. Thus, land and building, plant and machinery, motorcar, furniture, jewellery, route permits, goodwill, tenancy rights, patents, trademarks, shares, debentures, securities, units, mutual funds, zero-coupon bonds etc. are capital assets. We’re talking about the core of what you are, build, make, trade. You can sweat your assets, now!
Underutilized Assets and Excess Capacity in the Current Business World.
“Much more than wasted value”
Forbes estimated the revenue flowing through the sharing economy would surpass $3.5 billion in 2013 (it did, with growth exceeding 25%). As for today, others studies estimate over $2 to 4 Billion were invested in excess capacity businesses globally. Yes, the sharing economy is starting to significantly disrupt a number of mainstream industries, creating greater interest in mesh model organizations from all sectors of the economy. Then, the liquid economy happens.
For now, 80% of the things in our homes are used less than once a month, and self-storage has increased by 1,000% over the past 3 decades.
What’s in your company? When businesses think of excess capacity, they think of unused or under-utilized machines or tools in a production environment, project resources, cloud resources, computing capacity, offices, buildings, unused agricultural land etc. Many times companies maintain excess capacity for a reason which could include demand fluctuations over time (due to either seasonality or the business cycle), and economies of scale when demand grows over time.
Ladies and Gentlemen, times are changing. Today’s entrepreneurs environment is all about the crowd, collaborative + bigdata zeitgest and full of Internet/AI/Software everywhere… and YOU.
The guiding principles for these businesses and organizations revolve around efficient use of resources within communities of producers and consumers. In this context, they are rethinking both lifecycle production of goods and services as well as the social norms necessitated by shared and efficient resource utilization such as transparency, trust and open systems. The mesh and liquid economy shares many of these principles with other models and movements that seek to create more efficient and resilient communities. More growth in business, too.
So: Excess Capacity Business Models have increased in popularity. Why?
- Firstly, Yes they are: availability of excess capacity.
- Secondly, access over ownership, ability to use the asset or resource when needed without having to go through the hassles of owning it.
- Thirdly, growth (and growth, and growth, and growth) of technology platforms that have made it easier to find, use and pay for use of excess capacity or underutilized assets and services.
- Transparent and open data: those models are fundamentally based on network-enabled sharing of information.
- Fourthly, a growing TRUST culture due to the growth of social networks; a trust based on social connectivity. On YOU.
- Fifthly, sharing what is in excess enables most optimal use of assets or resources, thus contributing to sustainability, bettering the environment and creating a positive societal impact.
- Sixthly, ability to monetize out of excess capacity. The ROI point.
- Lastly and most importantly perhaps, older ways of doing things are no longer feasible due to the digitization of everything, growing search of efficient ways of doing things and just a radical shift in values and ethics as a result of a growing trust culture. Culture precedes any business.
Here we are: where’s this wasted value?
Into the lake of imagination.
- Enter the big co specific case. it’s all about how you lose competition, think about the Patent trap, versus how Elon Musk open its businesses.
- Yeah, Startups also do shit with their assets. We and they have to trade unused assets, to focus, refocus, rerefocus, to swap new innovation…
- The ROI point break (aren’t you ROI turned?)… And even more for investors (your ROI’s not good — Yes it is).
Not last, but not least either: trading assets says something about freedom (versus bank dependency or fundraising). We’ll talk about it one day… Roger that?
And last for today: about tomorrow — Yeah.
There’s an old way to practice business.
Won’t you fly to the new ecological/circular business era?
Now leveraging Excess Capacity is not a new concept, it has always existed. It is the use of technology that made the search, use and payment processing of such transactions, a simplified operation. The growing trust culture as a result of the growth of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Angelist, AirBnB, etc. enabled searching and connecting the “I HAVE” with the “I NEED” much more easily and reliably, thus resulting in an exponential growth of such businesses, that are offering some radically different ways of working and living.
Though it was eBay that pioneered the Excess Capacity business, it was truly Uber that popularized the notion of leveraging Excess Capacity by not just using technology to connect extra supply (I HAVE) and untapped demand (I NEED), but by opening the doors to shifting the way every industry views work and consumption.
No tool, No lead, no Google/Napster/Netflix for the next gen deals?
To operationalize the use of excess capacity, those in need (NEEDERS) need an easy and trusted access to the excess capacity of those who have what they need (HAVERS); the underlying technology platforms have to enable finding, matching and connecting the Needs with the Haves, enabled or leveraged through Trust-based social networks and simplified Transaction processing with an in-built Feedback mechanism; typically referred to as “One-button transactions”.
The Search
“looking for the sharing and liquid economy mothership”
Is the next big thing to index, aggregate, give access to any datas and people around businesses; to connect every potential added value/deal? We believe in such a plan.
It all depends on the user/value_added centric/focus vision/execution needed, continuous improvement of customers and user experience + an agile/lean process to success. This is all about how you do it — and what for.
Agile software development evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, continuous improvement and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. It is a conceptual framework that focuses on frequently delivering small increments of working software. The Agile Manifesto, which first laid out the underlying concepts of Agile development, introduced the term in 2001. If we speak about a revolution, it was one. More than ten years ago.. As the Lean Toyota’s method was. We (all) embrace it. This is the way a platform can disrupt/growth/focus/scale/become_a_USE.
(Repeat) where do the good boys/girls/bots go?
To their benefits. Yes, Robots also. Forget them and you’ll die soon.
Yes. Underutilized assets and excess capacity are much more than wasted value: Awesomes opportunities!
The Assets is/are coming.
I hope together we will break the rules that make ‘the software eating the world’ being ‘the software feeding the world’. This will be the subject of a next blogpost — The P2P businesses MotherShip is not far away from now.
Nicolas Voisin
Founder & CEO The Assets
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“You can’t always get what you WANT
But if you TRY sometimes well you might find
You get what you NEED”
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