Collaborative Consumption
Submitted by Eli Malinsky on June 23, 2010 - 9:03am
What do Farmer's Markets, Bikeshare Programs, Freecycle and Couchsurfing have in common? They are all examples of Collaborative Consumption. Check out this short video on the emerging trend toward collaborative consumption... while I am familiar with most of the examples they use, I never realized how they could all be tied together and identified as a trend in social innovation.
I remember in University that a professor once remarked on how ridiculous it was that each home-owner in a typical suburban neighbourhood (like mine!) had their own lawnmower, which they each used about an hour a week. It seemed like a startlingly absurd realization at the time; perhaps one day it will be an absurd relic of a bygone era...
Latest CSI Community Buzz
Monday, February 6, 2012
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Friday, February 3, 2012
Comments
Private Carsharing
Another good example of Collaborative Consumption is private carsharing, which is now also becoming more and more popular in Europe, after it was mainly introduced in the U.S. Examples of this include WhipCar in Great Britain on http://www.whipcar.com/ and rent-n-roll in Germany on http://www.rent-n-roll.de/ . Nevertheless, promoting p2p car rental might be a whole lot easier in countries where ownership of a certain good is not as important as its use. In my view, that's one of the reasons the U.S. is the chief pioneer of Collaborative Consumption.
collaborative consumption in toronto
Hi Eli, i just noticed your post here. I believe i met you briefly at the TEDxToronto CSI viewing last year. A small team of us have been building a peer-to-peer platform for collaborative consumption - focused on sharing idle durable consumer goods - If you or other folks at CSI are interested in discussing more on the collaborative consumption movement, i'd love to connect further!
RE: collaborative consumption in toronto
Great - send me a note...eli@socialinnovation.ca
Eli, Thanks for the blog post
Eli,
Thanks for the blog post on Collaborative Consumption. You raise an important point - many people are familiar with individual examples such as car sharing or say book swapping but what I hope to do is show how across sectors because of the convergence of social networks, a renewed belief in the importance of community, pressing environmental concerns, and cost consciousness we are moving us away from the old top-heavy, centralized,and controlled forms of consumerism toward one of sharing,
aggregation, openness, and cooperation. Goodbye Hyper-Consumption. Hello Collaborative Consumption.
Thanks,
Rachel Botsman
Post new comment