You are what you can access: Sharing and collaborative consumption online

Abstract

Sharing is a phenomenon as old as humankind, while collaborative consumption and the “sharing economy” are phenomena born of the Internet age. This paper compares sharing and collaborative consumption and finds that both are growing in popularity today. Examples are given and an assessment is made of the reasons for the current growth in these practices and their implications for businesses still using traditional models of sales and ownership. The old wisdom that we are what we own, may need modifying to consider forms of possession and uses that do not involve ownership.

Full text

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You are what you can Access:
Sharing and Collaborative Consumption Online
Russell Belk, York University
Submission: September 2013
Send correspondence to Russell Belk, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON,
M3J 1P3 Canada, Tel. 905 596-0079, rbelk@schulich.yorku.CA.

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You are what you can Access:
Sharing and Collaborative Consumption Online
Abstract
Sharing is a phenomenon as old as humankind, while collaborative consumption and the
“sharing economy” are phenomena born of the Internet age. This paper compares sharing and
collaborative consumption and finds that both are growing in popularity today. Examples are
given and an assessment is made of the reasons for the current growth in these practices and their
implications for businesses still using traditional models of sales and ownership. The old wisdom
that we are what we own, may need modifying to consider forms of possession and uses that do
not involve ownership.
Keywords: collaborative consumption, ownership, access, sharing, sharing economy,
community

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You are what you can Access:
Sharing and Collaborative Consumption Online
1.0 Introduction
Belk (1988) argues and theorizes that you are what you own. However with the Internet
we have many ways to express our identity without ownership (Belk 2013). Consumer research
bears witness to a flurry of recent attention to a group of related business and consumption
practices describable as sharing (Belk 2010), “collaborative consumption” (Botsman and Rogers
2010), “the mesh” (Gansky 2010), “commercial sharing systems” (Lamberton and Rose 2012),
“co-production” (Humphreys and Grayson 2008), “co-creation” (Prahalad and Ramaswamy
2004; Lanier and Schau 2007), “prosumption” (Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010; Toffler 1980),
“product-service systems” (Mont 2002), “access-based consumption,” (Bardhi and Eckhardt
2012), “consumer participation” (Fitzsimmons 1985), and “online volunteering” (Postigo 2003).
This attention corresponds to the rise of numerous for-profit and non-profit businesses that are
flourishing thanks to the rise of the “sharing economy” (e.g., Lessig 2008; A. Sacks 2011).
Examples of businesses that fall within one or more of these rubrics are Airbnb, Zipcar,
Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Freecycle, and Twitter. In a broad sense, the Internet
itself is a giant pool of shared content that can be accessed by anyone with an Internet
connection, a browser, and a government that allows access to most or all web content.
There are two commonalities in these sharing and collaborative consumption practices: 1)
their use of temporary access non-ownership models of utilizing consumer goods and services
and 2) their reliance on the Internet, and especially Web 2.0, to bring this about. Web 2.0 “…

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refers collectively to websites that allow users to contribute content and connect with each other”
(Carroll and Romano, 2011, p. 190). This is in contrast to Web 1.0 which primarily involved
one-directional provision of information to consumers who did not interact or respond to the web
site or to one another.
In this paper I seek to assess the similarities and differences between sharing and
collaborative consumption, examine the extent to which various parts of the “sharing economy”
truly involve sharing, and explain why these developments have stirred so much attention at this
particular time. I further consider the degree to which they challenge traditional business models
and the dangers and opportunities they may provide for business. For consumers, I consider how
emerging ways of accessing possessions without ownership may influence our sense of self.
2.0 Materials and Methods
This review is conceptual and based on an analysis of both scholarly research on sharing
and collaborative consumption and media accounts of the latest developments in these contexts.
I also draw on my own prior conceptual (Belk 2007, 2010) and empirical (Belk and Llamas
2012) work in studying sharing. I focus primarily on contemporary sharing activity, although the
analysis is grounded in an historical and cultural appreciation of the basic practice of sharing.
3.0 Theory
Rather than a precise definition of sharing, Belk (2010) suggests contrasting the
prototypes of sharing (mothering and the pooling and allocation of household resources) with the
prototypes of gift giving (the exchange by Della and Jim in the O’Henry story “The Gift of the
Magi”) and of marketplace exchange (buying bread at a store for money). Belk (2007, p. 126)
suggests that sharing involves “the act and process of distributing what is ours to others for their
use and/or the act and process of receiving or taking something from others for our use.” A more

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succinct definition is provided by Benkler (2004) who sees sharing as “nonreciprocal pro-social
behavior.”
We share for both functional reasons like survival (Fine 1980) and as an altruistic act
intended as a convenience, courtesy, or kindness to others. We would be churlish indeed to deny
someone the time of day, directions to a nearby location, or, if we are among fellow smokers, a
light for their cigarette. These patterns of expected behavior have become cultural norms.
Nevertheless, sharing is more likely to take place within family, close kin, and friends than
among strangers. When sharing is an inclusive act that is likely to make the recipient a part of a
pseudo-family and our aggregate extended self (Belk 1988, 2013), it can be described as “sharing
in” (Belk 2010; Ingold 1986).
On the other hand, when sharing involves dividing something between relative strangers
or when it is intended as a one-time act such as providing someone with spare change, directions,
or the time of day, it is described as “sharing out.” Thus the degree of intimacy involved in
sharing can vary considerably. But across this continuum, there remains a distinction between
non-ownership-based sharing and the transfer of ownership and reciprocal exchange that are
involved in both gift giving and marketplace exchange. Furthermore, no debt incurs when
partaking of sharing as would be the case with gifts and market transactions.
Borrowing and lending are borderline cases of sharing that generate an expectation that
the object or some equivalent will be returned. Sometimes “borrowing” is only a euphemism for
requested sharing. If one student asks another, “May I borrow a sheet of paper?” No one expects
that the borrower will ever return the sheet of paper. But this act of sharing may forge a small
bond between the students so that favors may more readily be exchanged back and forth in the
future. On the other hand if someone asks if they can borrow our mobile phone to make a call,

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we certainly expect them to return it as soon as the call is completed. Lending a mobile phone is
a case of sharing out, as is the practice of sharing a ride with someone who is hitchhiking.
Although hitchhiking has largely succumbed to fears of “stranger danger,” as we will see it is
being revived in several different forms with the help of the Internet.
Although Belk (2010) stipulates that we can share intangibles like ideas, values, and time,
he excludes simple coincidences like “sharing” a common language, place of birth, or set of
experiences, because these are not volitional choices. Two types of sharing that frequently occur
are “demand sharing” and “open sharing.” Demand sharing is evident when our children ask to
be fed, but also when someone asks us for the time of day. Neither can rightly be refused,
although the former involves sharing in while the latter involves sharing out. Open sharing is
implied when we tell a house guest, “My house is your house.” This implies that they can take
our food, sit on our furniture, and use our bathroom, all without asking. With family members,
such privileges are taken for granted, while for those whom we have invited to temporarily share
our home, they need to be established unless there is a long history of such open sharing between
the host and guest. Open sharing generally involves sharing in and would be quite uncommon
with strangers.
4.0 Findings: New sharing and pseudo-sharing practices
Having established some of the theoretical premises of sharing, distinctions from gift-
giving and marketplace exchange, as well as different types of sharing practices and their
relationship effects, I now turn to recent variations on the sharing theme as well as practices that
appear to be related, but do not involve true sharing. It is important to make some distinctions,
because there are a vast variety of activities that now invoke the term sharing to describe what

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they involve (Wittel 2011). After presenting and deconstructing these practices, I will consider
implications for businesses, consumers, and the environment.
4.1 Internet-facilitated sharing
The Internet and especially Web 2.0 has brought about new many new ways of sharing as
well as facilitating older forms of sharing on a larger scale. Grassmuck (forthcoming) calls this
“the sharing turn.” Starting with Napster, free sharing of digital music and films began to flow
between strangers who would download and often upload material via peer-to-peer (P2P) file
sharing (Giesler 2006; Hennig-Thurau, Henning, and Sattler 2007). This caused the music and
film industries to lose substantial sales of CDs and DVDs and provoked them to engage in a
series of actions attempting to enforce their intellectual property rights (IPR) through such means
as lawsuits, incorporating digital rights management (DRM) software into their products to curb
duplication, and putting up fake corrupt files online to fowl download attempts (Giesler 2008).
The resulting “war on sharing” (Aigrain 2012) has proved largely futile. Even though Napster
was shut down (and later reinstituted in legal form as a digital music store), many alternative
sites sprung up in its place, including BitTorrent protocol sites like The Pirate Bay, Grokster,
Gnutella, and Freenet.
Although iTunes, Rhapsody, Pandora, and Spotify have all succeeded in offering legal
downloads or streaming music, and in some cases also films and television programs, a
substantial proportion of downloads of films and music as well as software, e-books, and games
are illegal, especially among young people. Estimates vary widely and differ from country to
country, but there is no doubt that the practice is widespread. In Sweden sentiments in favor of
Internet sharing are so strong that the The Pirate Bay sharing site has successfully gained seats in

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Parliament. According to a survey by CBS (2009), 69 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29
believe that it is okay to share music online always or at least sometimes.
Although most of the non-market sharing sites involve true sharing, BitTorrent trackers
require that users balance their uploads and downloads (Aigrain 2012), making use more like a
barter system that can be regarded as a special form of market exchange (Belk 2010). Slater
(2000) found that those exchanging pornographic photos online also kept track of others’
balances between uploading and downloading, even though they had initially obtained the photos
online for free. Here too we see intrusions of the marketplace exchange ethos into what is in
other respects an act of online sharing.
While illegal music and film downloading has received the greatest amount of media
attention and the most opposition by the music and film industries, there are a number of other
sorts of sharing that have been initiated or facilitated by the Internet. YouTube asks us “What do
you have to share?” and expects users to freely upload videos that they have made or mashups
that they have created from other video content (John forthcoming). Although those who put up
popular videos can receive some compensation, the vast majority of content provision is un-
compensated. This non-compensation is more fully the case with photo sharing sites like Flickr
and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as interest-sharing sites like Pinterest,
ratings services like Tripadvisor and Angie’s List, among bloggers, and in ratings given to books
and movies on digital commerce sites like Amazon.com. It is not that these sites themselves are
non-profit. The sites gain revenues through online selling and advertising, as do search engines
like Google that facilitate accessing the vast archive of shared online information. But the
overwhelming majority of users of these sites and those who put up much of the information that
is able to be accessed online are freely sharing information, ratings, photos, and videos without

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compensation. Other examples include open source software like the Linux kernel that are
collectively developed with volunteer labor and made freely available to whoever wants to use
them as long as they credit the source (e.g., Hemetsberger forthcoming). Wikipedia is another
example of a useful source of information (in this case, encyclopedic information) created with
volunteer labor and usable by anyone at no cost other than having Internet access (Reagle 2010).
The transfer or use of material goods between consumers is another type of Internet-
facilitated sharing (Belk and Llamas 2012). EBay and many of the classified advertising sites
like craigslist and Kijiji offer goods for sale, but there are many others that provide free goods
shared with whoever responds to the listing. Examples include Freecycle and Really Really Free
Stuff (e.g., Arsel and Dobscha 2011; McCartney 2012; Willer, Flynn, and Zak 2012). In other
cases there are physical repositories of sharable goods like home and garden tool libraries or
children’s toy libraries that use online listings to reserve and keep track of such goods within a
neighborhood (e.g., Ozanne and Ballantine 2010). One example, the Sharehood (see
www.thesharehood.org), was started in a neighborhood in Melbourne, Australia by Michael
Green. He needed to use a washing machine and knew that between him and the nearest
laundromat there were dozens of homes with washing machines sitting idle. So he started an
online sharing service where neighbors could list the things they had available (e.g., electric
drills, bicycles, sewing machines) and others could reserve and use them at no cost. The service
has not only saved the neighborhood from having many redundant possessions, but more
importantly it has fostered a strong sense of community. It has since spread to other cities and
countries as have many other such local sharing organizations.
4.2 Collaborative consumption

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In order to specify what collaborative consumption is, it is necessary to first dismiss two
miss-specifications. Felson and Spaeth (1978) define acts of collaborative consumption as
“those events in which one or more persons consume economic goods or services in the process
of engaging in joint activities with one or more others” (p. 614). They include examples of
speaking on the telephone, drinking beer with friends, and even having sex while using birth
control products. Although it focuses on joint activities involving consumption, this definition is
too broad and is not sufficiently focused on the acquisition and distribution of the resource. It
relies instead on the mere fact of coordinated consumption. For example, if the people drinking
beer together each pay for their own beers, they are coordinating their consumption at a
particular time and place, but the consumption act is one of marketplace exchange. If one of
them bought a pitcher of beer for consumption by the group, this would be sharing because it
involves “the act and process of distributing what is ours to others for their use” (Belk 2007, p.
126).
If there are two of us and we do not want an entire pitcher of beer, but also do not want to
pay the inflated price of buying beer by the glass, we might convince a couple at another table to
split a pitcher of beer with us, with each table paying half the cost and receiving half the beer.
This agreement involves collaborative consumption in which we have jointly arranged both the
acquisition and distribution of the product. According to Felson and Spaeth’s (1978) definition,
if a group of people came together to watch a football game, this would constitute collaborative
consumption. But since these fans have not caused the event distribution to happen (the game
would be played at this time and place regardless of whether or not they bought tickets), nor have
they coordinated its acquisition (e.g., getting a group discount by buying their tickets together),
this too would not be collaborative consumption as I am using the term.

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A second use of “collaborative consumption” that I find to be miss-specified is that of
Botsman and Rogers (2010, p. xv) who see the concept as including “traditional sharing,
bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping.” This view is also too broad and
mixes marketplace exchange, gift giving, and sharing. They more accurately delineate the
concept of collaborative consumption when they describe how Joe Gebbia, Brian Chesky, and
Nathan Blecharcyzk conceptualized Airbnb.com, the application that allows people to buy and
sell the use of a room or home, with the transaction facilitated by the Internet and providing a fee
to the company:
On a whiteboard in their apartment they drew a spectrum. On one side they wrote
“hotels” and on the other they scribbled rental listings such as craigslist, youth
hostels, and nonmonetary travel exchanges such as CouchSurfing that help people
travel by creating a network of couches available to sleep on for free. (Botsman
and Rogers 2010, p. x)
The middle ground, which should include craigslist and youth hostels as well as Airbnb,
exemplifies collaborative consumption in that it includes people coordinating acquisition and
distribution of a resource for a fee.
My definition of collaborative consumption differs only slightly from this one.
Collaborative consumption is people coordinating the acquisition and distribution of a resource
for a fee or other compensation. By including other compensation, the definition also
encompasses bartering, trading, and swapping, which involve giving and receiving non-monetary
compensation. But this definition of collaborative consumption excludes sharing activities like
those of CouchSurfing because there is no compensation involved. In fact CouchSurfing.org
specifically prohibits it.

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The definition also excludes gift giving which involves a permanent transfer of
ownership. For example, if very generous parents gave their child the title to a condominium
apartment, this is a gift rather than collaborative consumption, sharing, or marketplace exchange.
The ground that collaborative consumption occupies is a middle ground between sharing and
marketplace exchange, with elements of both. Zipcar.com (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2012) and many
other .com “sharing” organizations offer collaborative consumption opportunities. Elsewhere I
(Belk forthcoming) call the transactions on these faux sharing commercial ventures “pseudo-
sharing” in that they often take on a vocabulary of sharing (e.g., “car sharing”), but are more
accurately short-term rental activities.
Although Bardhi and Eckhardt (2012) conflate collaborative consumption and sharing in
their concept of “access-based consumption,” they accurately describe the domain and
motivation of collaborative consumption in observing that: “Instead of buying and owning
things, consumers want access to goods and prefer to pay for the experience of temporarily
accessing them” (p. 881). Collaborative consumption is the subset of Bardhi and Eckhardt’s
(2012) notion of access-based consumption that they call market-mediated access. As the
following subsections demonstrate, collaborative consumption is a rapidly growing phenomenon
with several variants.
4.2.1 A collaborative consumption example: transportation
Zipcar is a commercial “car sharing” organization with a fleet of automobiles in North
American and some European cities. Participants who pay a yearly fee can reserve cars online
and unlock and operate them with a membership card that they receive. After use for a few
hours the vehicle is returned to the original location. Users need not worry about fuel, insurance,
parking fees, or maintenance. If fuel is needed there is a credit card in the car. A number of late

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model cars and vans are available. Since the vehicle currently needs to be returned to the
location where it was picked up, the service is not as flexible as the short-term bicycle sharing
programs in many cities in which there are many drop-off points in various parts of the city.
Perhaps in the future with autonomous self-driving cars, they will come to us rather than us
having to go to them.
Such short-term “car sharing” has become quite popular and Avis has acquired Zipcar
recently. The practice has also caught the attention of automobile manufacturers who are
offering their own car sharing programs, including Daimler Benz’s (Mercedes’) Car2Go, BMW’s
DriveNow, Volkswagon’s Quicar, and Peugeot’s Mu (Firnkorn and Müller 2012; Wüst 2011).
The details are handled by smartphone. Why would auto companies facilitate practices that seem
to encourage short-term rental rather than ownership of their cars? One reason is that young
people are apparently losing their interest in car ownership as being important to their self-
definition. They find car purchase, maintenance, and parking to be prohibitively expensive and
increasingly would rather not have the hassle.
The flight from the suburbs to the city is another factor. Car ownership makes no sense for
an increasing number of people; the auto companies see short-term rental as a way to still be
involved in serving their transportation needs (Nelson 2013; Rosenthal 2013; Wohlsen 2013).
General Motors’ P2P acquisition, Relay Rides, also puts together car owners who wish to
rent their cars for a few hours and those who wish to use them. Rather than offer their own fleet
of cars to those who want to use them on a short term basis, the use of existing owners’ cars
avoids having to maintain and store the cars, and a blanket insurance policy covers the owner-
rented car while in use. The strategy attempts to keep a foot in the door and offer a service
facilitated by their OnStar system of communication among GM car owners.

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Mercedes also offers another service called car2gether which puts together car owners
and those seeking to hitch a ride between two locales. Besides generating favorable press, the
car-reducing, congestion-reducing, environmentally friendly strategy also offers a way to make
car ownership more attractive to users who can then earn part of the cost of car ownership by
offering others rides. Not only do the car companies facilitate such ride sharing, so do
independent sites such as Uber, Local Motion, Zimride, Spride, Getaround, Lyft, Sidecar,
blablacar, and many others that have sprung up in various cities in order to reduce traffic, reduce
pollution, save money, and create efficiencies greater than those of the old model of single
drivers driving an hour or two a day and searching for limited and expensive parking spaces for
their vehicle while they work, shop, visit, or consume entertainment.
Some true sharing sites also offer transportation services. San Francisco offers hundreds
of “casual car pool” locations throughout the San Francisco Bay area, generally near public
transportation stops. Those seeking rides wait at these locations and drivers stop by offering
rides to different locations. After picking up a passenger the driver can then use the high
occupancy vehicle lane and get to their desired location more quickly. Similarly there are
cooperative car sharing organizations like Majorna in Goteborg, Sweden in which members pitch
in to buy, maintain, and schedule the use of their small fleet of cars (Jonsson 2007).
If the fears that drove hitchhiking out of common practice were those of dangerous
strangers driving or seeking rides, one way around this is through reputation systems. Just as
when buyers and sellers rate each other after eBay purchases, San Francisco ride sharers and
many other such services help to build trust in particular people, and distrust of others, through
online ratings after the fact. In addition testimonials, putting up photos and videos of people and
the cars to be shared or collaboratively consumed all help to build a reputational economy

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making transactions between strangers safer and less uncertain (Massum and Tovey 2011; Sacks
2011; Solove 2007). Even people and cars with strange or unpleasant smells are flagged on the
web site for the casual car pool. Companies like TrustCloud are attempting to offer reputational
ratings that can be used across different collaborative consumption sites (Sacks 2011).
4.2.2 Other collaborative consumption ventures
Many additional collaborative consumption organizations fit in a variety of categories of
goods and services as diverse as P2P lending, crowd funding, shared Wi-Fi, community
supported agriculture, skill barter banks, car repair, child care, and catering (see Botsman and
Rogers 2011; Leadbeater 2008; Slee 2013). What they have in common is an Internet facilitated
ability to help people find things that we once had to buy or rent or lease for days or years at a
time (Cheshire, Walters, and Rosenblatt 2010; Durgee and O’Connor 1995). One Toronto-based
car sharing organization called AutoShare transforms the old home pro-ownership question,
“Why rent when you can buy?” into an updated equivalent within the emerging sharing
economy, “Why own when you can rent by the hour?” To the extent that we adopt this ideology
we may be moving toward the situation that my fore-title highlights, “You are what you can
access” And with short term rental becoming more common, we are increasingly uncertain
whether or not another consumer owns the car, house, handbag, jewelry, mobile phone, or dress
that we see them using.
This perspective is not to say that collaborative consumption and sharing are without
problems. The music and film industries vigorously opposed online sharing of their products.
The publishing industry and online book sellers have been somewhat less aggressive, but still
take various DRM precautions to forestall duplication of their e-books. Hotels are pressuring
municipalities to enforce hotel or bed and breakfast regulations on those who would offer short-

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term rental services through the likes of Airbnb, HouseTrip, Windu, and 9flats to rent all or a
portion of their home.
The same is true of restaurants that feel threatened by “private kitchen” offerings, where
people buy a meal in someone else’s home, and want them to be inspected for the same health
and safety standards that the must obey. Some banks rail against P2P lending and crowd
funding. Whether or not these reactions are wise and effective in resisting the sharing economy
is an open question. Clearly they were not in the case of music and film. The final section that
follows considers whether business strategists should feel threatened by the sharing economy and
what problems and opportunities this economy may create for them.
5.0 Discussion: Business implications
Successful new sharing ventures are likely to shake established industries to the extent
that sharing and collaborative consumption result in fewer purchases or facilitate a shift from
individual ownership to shared ownership or short-term rental (Boesler 2013). Flight or fight are
two knee-jerk reactions to disruptive technologies. Flight would constitute such actions as
diversifying out of the industry, while fight reactions are exemplified by those exhibited by the
music, film, and publishing industries by invoking IPR to attempt to stave off the sharing
economy. The results of these fights have been poor and keep these industries from embracing
new technologies and profiting from them.
The creative destruction of old business models and the adoption of new creative ways of
participating is a third strategy. The short-term car rental and ride-sharing efforts by a number of
the automobile companies are a case in point. So are music and film streaming as well as video
on demand by Netflix, Internet service providers, cable television companies, Apple, Amazon,
and various software companies. But by charging for what consumers with some effort may be

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able to get for free, they are capturing only a portion of the market which has high ethical qualms
or those who are cash rich and time poor and who therefore prefer the convenience and safety of
paid downloads. These adaptive practices help, but do not fully participate in the disruptive
technologies that traditional ownership-based companies are facing.
An alternative adaptive strategy is to provide content for free and find other sources of
revenue. Google doesn’t charge for its browsers and encourages people and companies to use
them at no cost. Their hefty revenues instead come from ad revenues and the ability to target
messages to users whose searches are matched with the ad content they receive as banner ads and
paid links to commercial sites at the start of a string of search results. Publishers and the music
industry have relied on intermediaries to provide revenue sources. Libraries buy e-books and
subscriptions to periodicals from publishers and provide them free to patrons. Music distribution
services like iTunes, Rhapsody, and Spotify charge for their products or services and rebate
royalties to artists and music companies. Copyright services do the same with libraries and other
institutions that provide or allow users to make copies of material under copyright.
An additional strategy is to buy up a leading company offering the disruptive technology
—Zipcar in the case of Avis. In still other cases the disruptive technology may expand rather
than contract the market. Bag Borrow or Steal offers rotating access to designer handbags and
accessories for an affordable monthly fee. A consumer spending $50 a month gains access to an
endless stream of designer bags, one at a time, whereas it would take years of saving this amount
each month in order to afford to purchase even one of the bags. Thus the consumers who lust for
such bling would likely not be in the market to purchase the bags. The service is a little like
counterfeit goods in this case, except that it offers the real thing. Rent the Runway does
something similar with designer dresses, jewelry, and accessories. In this sense these sharing

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economy alternatives may expand rather than contract the market, just as time share
condominiums have done for the second home vacation market.
A final consideration for an existing ownership-based business is to assess the degree to
which the disruptive technology represents a permanent versus temporary anomaly in business-
as-usual. Many of the sharing and collaborative consumption organizations that currently exist
benefitted from the economic collapse that began in 2008 that caused some consumers to lose
their homes, cars, and investments and made most everyone more price sensitive. Furthermore it
is still unclear whether the twenty-somethings who are now living downtown and getting by
without a car by occasionally renting one by the hour will change their ways when they have
families. But these sorts of analyses should not lull a firm into complacency.
The digital revolution is still in its infancy and is certain to bring further dramatic
changes in the future. Both now and in the future only the company looking to go out of
business should put its head in the sand and assume that emerging challenges will just go away.
Instead companies should be asking themselves, “How else can the consumer acquire and use the
types of goods or services I currently provide and how might I innovate to capitalize on these
possibilities?” Global warming, rising fuel and raw material prices, growing pollution, and other
anticipatable trends are further stimulants to future sharing and collaborative consumption
opportunities. By regarding changing technologies and environmental trends as bringing
opportunities rather than threats, forward looking firms can benefit from these disruptive
technologies by being on the forefront of delivering them.
6.0 Conclusions
The average car in North American and Western Europe is in use 8 percent of the time
(D. Sacks 2011). The average electric drill is used 6 to 13 minutes over its lifetime (Earth Share,

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no date). Sharing makes a great deal of practical and economic sense for the consumer, the
environment, and the community. It may also make a great deal of sense for businesses that are
sufficiently flexible, innovative, and forward thinking. Botsman and Rogers (2010) suggest that
collaborative consumption could be as important as the Industrial Revolution in terms of how we
think about ownership. Everyday some of the bravest and brightest thinkers are dreaming up the
next Internet startup intended to bring its creators a fortune. Against this backdrop it would be
folly to ignore sharing and collaborative consumption as alternative ways of consuming and as
new business paradigms.
Few industries are exempt from potential disruptive change within the sharing economy.
While universities have been slow to embrace online teaching, university academics have long
participated in a cornucopia of shared knowledge. Rather than work individually and keep our
knowledge secret, we are happy to publish it and give it away to anyone who is interested. This
is the open model of science that replaced the medieval scientist trying to keep discoveries secret
and thereby condemning fellow scientists to all start from scratch (David 2005). What then
should we make of universities rushing to patent discoveries before allowing them to be
published? Surely nothing good. When knowledge and learning are auctioned off to the highest
bidder we all stand to lose. Shaking lose of the former wisdom that, “You are what you own”
and converting to a new wisdom, “You are what you share,” indicates that we just may be
entering the post-ownership economy.

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