Collaborative Consumption

What would life be like if you didn’t have to actually own the stuff you use everyday?

Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers’ book What’s Mine is Yours: the Rise of Collabortive Consumption explores companies who are trying to provide just that.  Imagine the Netflix business model applied to everything from apartments to cars to lawnmowers, and that’s what they’re talking about. It sounds like a great way to save money, time, and the resources that go into making stuff that sits unused for most of its life in our garages and closets.  But, it requires a fundamental shift in thinking from valuing the ownership of the things in our lives to valuing the utility they give us.  Do we want the powerdrill or do we want the holes that the drill makes?

Some examples:

Airbnb is a site that coordinates travellers with people wanting to rent out anything from couch for the night to a villa for a month.  There are rating systems so that you can rest easy knowing that your host probably isn’t an axe murderer.

Zipcar is a service that allows you to reserve a car any time of the day or night for as little as an hour.

Freecycle coordinates people who have things to get rid of with people who want them.  Their tagline:  “There’s no such thing as waste, just useful stuff in the wrong place”.

TechShop is a series of  workshops on steriods -- they have the space, advice, and tools that any tinkerer would want but few could afford.  Monthly fees give you access to half a million dollars worth of equipment.

Swap.com matches you up with people who have books, CDs, and DVDs you want while coordinating others who want the ones you have.


Now lest anyone gather their pitchforks, burning torches, and mobs and start screaming ‘Socialism!’, let me assure you the collaborative consumption model doesn’t involve government ownership or intervention.  It is a way of organizing group behavior that preserves the individual’s autonomy and freedom, perhaps even more so than our current economic model (credit card debt from the garage full of stuff, anyone?).

There is a high degree of trust required with consuming collaboratively, and hence mechanisms like eBay’s user ratings system have emerged.  In fact, trust between strangers is one of the four principles of successfully collaboratively consuming.  The three others include critical mass (enough people participating to make it work), belief in the commons (the more people that participate, the better it is for everyone), and idling capacity (the stuff being shared needs to be sitting ‘idle’ enough with a single user).

I foresee two major resistances to the collaborative model.

First, companies that make products (cars, toasters, iPods, etc) have built many of their core competencies around the production, marketing, and distribution of that stuff rather than the re-distribution and maintenance of it.  I expect a large resistance from manufacturers as they are asked to profit not from producing and selling but from organizing and redistributing products.  We are, after all, known as ‘consumers’ rather than ‘users’ (or even ‘people’).  Consumers consume things, after all; in the Collaborative Consumption model, we might better be described as ‘sharers’.  It will require a fundamental shift in the corporate DNA of many companies to address this change, from selling the product to selling the function it provides.

Second, many of the profitable business models now using collaborative consumption rely heavily on the internet and its related infrastructures.  Should access to that infrastructure be disrupted or inhibited (by cost, natural disaster, or Godzilla) the geographically dispersed collaborative communities cease to function.

Botsman and Rodgers contend that ‘ . . . the more space and time we spend dedicated to accumulating stuff in our lives, the less room we have for other people.’  With the rise of collaborative consumption, I hope the corrollary is also true.