The Collaborative Economy is a crowd commerce revolution.
People are empowered to get what they need from each other - using common mobile technologies already in their pockets. Several quarters ago, people told me it was a fad, it wouldn't last, peer to peer commerce can't happen at scale. Like social media was disbelieved in 2005 (I vividly remember the attack of the blogs), we're seeing disruptions - but these impact real revenues and are not just a communications disruption.
Real revenues are being lost by incumbents.
Yesterday, across newsstands across the SF Bay area and online (my pic, above), it was reported that taxis are suffering 65% loss in rides -two thirds of revenue lost in less than 3 years. It's not limited to SF,DC taxis are down 22% and a once dominant taxi cab company says they have less than 18 months of life left. A recent study by Boston University shows that for every 1% growth of Airbnb, hotels are impacted half a percent -and Airbnb is growing at an incredible rate. How fast? Uber's revenues are doubling every six months, and LendingClub, where people lend to each other instead of going to banks, is having hockey-stick like growth having brokered $5B of loans in five years.
The startups are heavily funded, and in every industry.
Even more, the investors are funneling incredible amounts of money into this market, $2.7B in just under the last ten months (see spreadsheet), with Google being a leading investor in the market. It's not limited to cars and homes and dollars, the Collaborative Economy is impacting many industries including food, business services, retail, business space, and more, you can see the Honeycomb Framework to see how goods, food, services, transportation, space, and money are impacted. The next version will include health, utilities, education, and more.
Progressive corporations augment business model to partner with the crowd.
It's important you prepare your company now for these changes. People are empowered to get what they need from each other, the crowd is becoming like a company. The good news is, companies can use these same strategies and technologies. Ford has provided special cars to Lyft drivers, Hyatt has partnered with Uber for instant bookings using an API, Whole Foods has partnered with Instacart for crowd-based home deliveries, and Verizon has enabled sharing of many objects using their vast network. (Disclosure: The above companies are members of my company, Crowd Companies)
If you work for or with large companies, access the Body of Work in the Collaborative Economy and discover how other companies are crowd-proofing by joining this movement.