Welcome, this industry newsletter shares key market changes, in a twice-monthly publication, curated by Jeremiah Owyang, Founder of Catalyst Companies™, you can subscribe to the email newsletter on the footer of the homepage.

Shapeways and Hasbro Birth 3D SuperFanArt
Shapeways mission is to help people in the creative community to make exactly what they want, for themselves, to share and sell to others. That mission just got a lot easier as Hasbro, one of the leading toy manufacturers in the world, has continued to embrace the collaborative economy by joining with Shapeway to make products on demand that might otherwise never make it into people’s hands. This collaboration utlizes 3D printing technology to help creative designers expose their products to a worldwide audience and to help Hasbro tap into designs they most likely would never have seen before this alliance. Read more.

Uber and Airbnb Concur to Attract Business Travelers
“Often easier to use, often cheaper, and often more versatile,” is an appropriate description of both Uber and Airbnb, leaders in the ride and space sharing niches. There is a certain irony about the fact that both companies recently announced that they have partnered with Concur to enhance their services for business travellers, a much bigger and more consistent, potential revenue stream. Concur is the provided of one of the leading expense tracking, business software systems. The collaboration brings Uber and Airbnb into the heart of the business travel model, while Concur gives them acceptance and credibility. Read more.

FundingCircle Expands Horizons in P2P Lending
As traditional lending institutions continue to withholding funding for small businesses, the vacuum the banks have created is being filled at a rapid pace by peer-to-peer crowd-funding startups. FundingCircle is a London-based that was established in 2009. In the ensuing five years it has helped more than 5,000 business to find more than £300 million. s 2013 was coming to a close, the company that advertizes that it can obtain funding for applicants within seven business days, launched operations in the U.S. By January it had already processed $300,000 for small businesses in North America. By the end of June the figure was in excess of $65 million. Read more.

Lyft Begins Operations is NYC (Finally)
We were all looking forward to July 11th when Lyft was originally set to begin operations in New York City, ironically, the third city in which it hoped to activate in New York State. Lyft’s original plans were thwarted by a lawsuit filed jointly by NYS Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman and the state’s insurance regulator, Benjamin Lawsky. Now that the parties have settled their differences, Lyft is ready to join competitor Uber in the Big Apple tonight, July 25th. Under the terms of the agreement, Lyft may must use commercially licensed drivers and may not provide them with liability insurance. Although it must suspend operations in Rochester and Buffalo for an indefinite period of time, the company will open in all five NYC boroughs. Originally it was slated to open only in Brooklyn and Queens. Read more.

Canada’s AskforTask Models TaskRabbit
Imagine a collaborative Askers and Taskers. That’s what brothers Muneeb and Nabeel Mushtaq did when they couldn’t easily find a plumber to fix their mother’s leaky faucet. Out of the incident they conceived and began AskforTask a website and (soon-to-be) mobile app by which Askers advertize tasks that they need to have done and where Taskers can respond and contract to do the job at an agreed price. AskforTask earns its keep by getting a 15% cut once the task has been assigned. There are some concerns that the endeavor will promote a lifestyle of “one-off jobs,” but isn’t that what freelancing, sharing and collaboration are all about? Read more.

Welcome, this industry newsletter shares key market changes, in a twice-monthly publication, curated by Jeremiah Owyang, Founder of Catalyst Companies™, you can subscribe to the email newsletter on the footer of the homepage.

Funding Grows for Sharing Startups

The statistics are amazing. A survey of startup funding taken in July 2013 indicated that the average amount of funding for the 200 entities surveyed was $29.0 million. The average amount of funding per company in 2014 has increased by 251% to $102.0 million. The percentage of increase is dramatic, in part, because one of the 200 (Uber) received $1.2 billion alone. Nonetheless, the same 200 companies were included in both surveys. Removing the $1.2 billion factor, the average still increase by 80%. Read more.

Lyft Follows Uber to Freelancers Union
Ride-sharing leader, Lyft, continues to improve its services, including those that it offers to its drivers. By partnering with the 250,000 member Freelancers Union, independent Lyft drivers now have access to a broad spectrum of benefits including group health insurance and retirement plans. The union, which was established in 1995, estimates that one of every three persons in the American workforce are now freelancers. Read more.

LiquidSpace Helps Major Hotel Chains Leverage the Space-Sharing Sector
San Francisco’s own LiquidSpace, a leader in the space-sharing economy, has added to its already 4,000 available workspaces by collaborating with visionaries at Marriott, Ritz-Carlton, Hyatt and other major hotels to turn their empty spaces – be they rooms or lobby areas into on-demand workspaces. Not only are mobile workers more easily able to find a convenient place to work or meet for an hour or longer, but the hotels benefit by increasing their room usage and occupancy rate. Read more.

Not Your Grandfather’s Fast Food
The original fast food concept was a no-seating, walk-up window arrangement. Eventually it changed to dine-in or drive-thru. Today, the concept of fast food is undergoing another radical transformation as sharing startups, like Sprig, Munchery and Feastly are infusing new paradigms into the sector. The new fast food has no walk-ups, no dining in, no pick-up and no drive thrus. It is about fresh meals prepared in a centrally located, ordinary, inexpensive commercial space to be delivered to your locations. Delivery is not new, but there is much more to the concept that meets the eye, and it spells convenience for consumers and higher margins for these visionary businesses. Read more.

The Maker Movement Is About More Than Trinkets and Art
What do a South African carpenter, a nine-year-old boy with no fingers on his right hand, a teenager and the Johnson County Library (KS) have in common? The answer is one of the most compelling stories to come out of the Maker Movement. Sixteen-year-old Mason Wilde wanted his friend, Matthew Shields, to have working fingers. In the “Makerspace” of the library, he found the plans for a robotic hand designed by carpenter Richard Van As. Using the library’s shared 3D printer, Mason printed the components and connected them per the specifications. For less than $60, Matthew now has a working hand. This is the heart of the Maker Movement. Read more.

Welcome, this industry newsletter shares key market changes, in a twice-monthly publication, curated by Jeremiah Owyang, Founder of Catalyst Companies™, you can subscribe to the email newsletter on the footer of the homepage.

Owyang: Don’t Protest the Collaborative Economy — Lead It
This week, thousands of infuriated taxi drivers across dozens of European cities brought transportation services to a standstill. The taxi protest against the Collaborative Economy backfired – it made Uber more popular than ever! Instead of fighting this movement, Taxi companies and incumbents from every industry should adopt these same strategies and technologies. Read more.

Storefront is the Airbnb for retailers
Wherever there is a room or a building that is a space that is not being used, it is probably costing someone something to maintain it. Like Airbng helps homeowners to share their idle space with people who need a place to stay, but who want something other than the conventional hotel experience, Storefront’s goal is “to make starting an offline store as easy as starting an online store” by using a similar model to help “connect people with something to sell with space to sell it,” without the retailer committing to a long-term lease. Read more.

Lyft Gets a Big Lift in NYC
As the old saying goes, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” Ashwini Chhabra, deputy commissioner of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, has left his job to take a position at Lyft. Lyft has apparently built a relationship with and flashed enough cash to coax Mr. Chhabra to switch sides. He will become Lyft’s first Director of Policy Development and Community Engagement. One of the least employed, but most effective, strategies that can be implemented in a contentious business situation is to hire a key individual from the other side. If that individual has demonstrated acumen and acuity, why not get them on your side. Look for what used to be brick walls to become red tape that Mr. Chhabra knows how to cut through. Read more.

Even Crowdfunding is Getting Funded
If funding firms need funding, then it follows that crowdfunding sites need funding. It also follows that funding firms can find new investors through crowdfunding. The fact is that the crowdfunding arena is gaining more and more interest from both ends of the pipeline in what may be the best example of a true collaborative economy. Sir Richard Branson and several other prominent investors have given crowdfunding site a funding boost. The amount of investment is undisclosed, but, given the names involved, it hast to be substantial. At the other end of the spectrum, Fundrise, a Washington-based crowdfunding site has raised $31 million to support the expansion of services nationally. Fundrise offers street investors to participate in funding major real estate projects with as little as $100. That’s tapping into the crowd! To read more about the Indiegogo funding, click here. For additional information about Fundrise click here.

Airbnb Offers Food Services
Airbnb, the leader in residential space sharing, is now operating a pilot project in its headquarter city of San Francisco. That project is promoting the concept of Airbnb hosts providing menued meals services. At this point, the hosts are given free reign to create their own menus. Guests are typically offered a three-course meal at $25 per person. With over 10 million rooms and homes booked per night worldwide, expect this $10 billion company to keep finding new ways to offer crowd-friendly services. Read more.

Amex Partners with Uber
Don’t just pay for your Uber ride with American Express. Earn Membership Rewards™ as well when you pay with your Amex card. Simply register your rewards-eligible card with Uber, using the Uber app. You can earn points for you rides and use points to pay for your rides. You even get points when you use your points. Plus, as Amex users know, you can use the points to purchase other merchandise and services in which you eligible cards are enrolled. Read more.

Katie Couric with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky
Brian Chesky is one of the world’s youngest billionaires today because he turned his vision of the sharing economy into a $10 billion based entirely on the sharing concept. Katie Couric recently interviewed Brian about his real-life rags to riches – or in his case, cereal to sharing – story and his infamous plan for Airbnb to take over the travel industry. Although he declined to share the details of his plan, he did explain his dream of providing a complete travel experience from the moment a traveller walks out his front door until they return, including pet-sitting services whilst the traveller is enjoying the Airbnb experience. Read more.

Move over Klout. Move over Fico. The new score is the Collaborative Economy Customer Score.

Today, a ground-breaking deal was struck between Uber and Amex (a few days ago, they received millions of dollars from Fidelity). You can use your Amex loyalty points to pay for rides. When you use your Amex card to pay for transactions, these glean additional two times the loyalty points. But all that’s just table stakes. What is really important is that this pushes aside fuzzy and squishy social media metrics to reveal what really matters: finding out the metrics of behaviors and peer-to-peer trust, backed with factual financial data.

The Collaborative Economy is based on peer-to-peer commerce, which results in increased transactions at a local/mobile level and, likely, with higher trust. The collaboration between Uber and Amex enables the construction of metrics to measure the value of this new type of customer.

The new Collaborative Economy Customer Score provides insights never before combined:

1. Customer ratings. Uber drivers rate passengers – we know who the best customers are – and who’s not worthy for a late night ride.
2. Provider quality. Like Yelp and eBay, customers can rate the drivers, a social metric. .
3. Local transaction data. Since these transactions are happening at a local level, they provide data regarding traffic routes and times, and can, therefore be used to accurately predict when and where people use Uber’s services.
4. New loyalty data. Since Uber and Amex are sharing their data and rewards, they lock in a powerful new relationship.
5. A new perspective. When combined with traditional financial data like loyalty points, credit scores, and net worth, we can have a powerful new insights into customer behaviors.

Putting all five data points together, it means we can marry traditional financial data with customer and provider ratings, and forecast network behaviors at a local level. The combined insights can help us predict who’s likely to spend more money, with less friction in the transaction –and for top brands that’s important. This data is likely more accurate than Facebook data as it’s directly tied to actual commerce.

Just some other data points: Our recent research found that people that make over $100k are more likely to participate in this new economy. The CEO of American Express is on record as saying card holders spent “hundreds of millions of dollars” last year on Uber rides. Both of these statements indicate there’s money to be made here.

This is a great example of a “Crowd Company” i.e., how corporations and crowd-based businesses can work together within new business models. Get ready for the Collaborative Economy Customer Score.

Related: My prediction that Uber is the next Amazon, A timeline graphic of all corporate partnerships in the collaborative economy.

Welcome, this industry newsletter shares key market changes, in a twice-monthly publication, curated by Jeremiah Owyang, Founder of Catalyst Companies™, you can subscribe to the email newsletter on the footer of the homepage.

uTest is Resolving Complex Issues for the Crowd The company formerly known as uTest – now known as Applause recently began collaborating with Appirio to combined their shared sourcing skills for the greater good of the sharing crowd. Appirio shares the services of over 600,000 to help clients build apps. Applause offers more than 2,000 techie-type users to test apps “in the wild.” Crowd app building combined with crowd quality control promise a bright future for better apps. Read more.

Sort Out the Crowdfunding Noise with Crowdsurfer The rise of crowdfunding sites is happening at such a rapid rate that it has literally become beyond the ability of any one individual to keep up with the pace. Crowdsurfer, a Cambridge, UK startup, is building a data aggregator that will help seekers find the ideal funding site. Founder Emily McKay’s envisions Crowdsurfer becoming the Bloomberg of the crowdfunding world. Read more.

Wegosee Ensures That the Crowd Gets What it Hopes to Get Someone once said that for every problem solved another problem is created. That has been a problem in the space sharing segment of the Collaborative Economy. Renting a space through crowd sharing has opened up opportunities for fraud regarding simple matters of over-promised facility conditions to finding that a listed space does not actually exist. Wegosee is a collaborative company that will visit vacation homes, auctions, or any other POS in which an individual may be interested, to ensure that your expectations are met. Read more.

Miami Police Make Lyft Drivers Feel the Heat According to the Miami Herald, police are running a sting operation target Lyft drivers. Undercover police call the ride-sharing service, hop a ride, then fine the independent Lyft drivers for a variety of offenses, including not having a chauffeur’s license or not having a Dade County for-hire license. Then they fine them $2,000 and impound their vehicles. We’ve all known that the sharing economy can be disruptive, but it is neither devious or destructive. Lyft, by the way, has paid each driver’s fines. Read more.

The Collaborative Economy, which includes sharing, maker movement, crowd funding, and crowd lending, is perceived mainly as a peer-to-peer movement. Yet, it’s not limited to individuals helping each other alone. Companies, both large and small are replicating the same strategies and tactics to improve their own business. Companies themselves are becoming like peers – collectively tapping into this collaborative space.

Ten years ago, with the rise of social networks like Myspace, Friendster and Facebook, we saw companies becoming frustrated because they were not able to participate in these peer-to-peer social networks. As a response, we saw the rise of branded, online communities emerge, such as Lithium, Jive, Telligent, Chatter, and Mzinga. Today, a majority of corporations have their own branded, online forum or community for employees, partners, or customers. This same progression is now happening with the Collaborative Economy

Regardless of peer-to-peer or business-to-business, tenets of the movement include: 1) Activating idle resources for usage, therefore reducing waste. 2) A paradigm of access versus ownership, therefore reducing ownership as people get what they need on-demand. 3) Using technology to find these idle resources, then accessing the internet of things, mobile devices, social networks, online marketplaces, digital reputations, and online payment systems.

The Collaborative Economy is for Business-to-Business

Here are a few examples. (Feel free to add more to the comments section.) For those new to the space, associations are provided, so it’s easy to understand how the company is replicating a B2C solution for B2B. Example: “the Airbnb for supply chain.”

1. Localmotion replicates Zipcar features, so any company can enable car and vehicle sharing. Their software reduces the need for keys so that employees can access shared resources by using digital badges to access fleet vehicles.
2. TwoGo, SAP’s ridesharing software, enables workers to rideshare, reducing global waste, cars on the road, and parking snafus at the corporate office while encouraging productivity within the workforce as they communicate in real time.
3. Flow2 enables companies to share their goods, resources, and staff with other companies in an online marketplace. Akin to eBay, Yerdle, and craigslist, this B2B service offers companies the ability to be more efficient with their own resources while obtaining additional resources quickly, on demand.
4. oDesk and Elance (which have merged) enable corporations to access online workers on demand. This business employment solutions provider offers business services from project management, software development, office work, copy editing, and more to companies, on-demand, around the globe.
5. Cargomatic, the Uber for shipping, enables companies to more efficiently manage their supply chain. This enables businesses to find out which trucks with in a local route have available capacity, managing on-demand planning and reducing waste.
6. NearMe, a white label Airbnb, enables any company to build a marketplace. If your company is being disrupted by rapidly growing marketplaces like Airbnb, Lyft, Lending Club, or TaskRabbit, you can build your own marketplace and tap the crowd with NearMe.
7. Storefront, the Airbnb for retail, enables retailers who have excess and idle space, to rent it out to other businesses for an on-demand form of “popup retail.” This fosters more product offerings on shelves, and reduces the profit-eating expense of wasted space.
8. WARPit, an eBay for business, enables employees to distribute idle resources on demand. Does your business have chairs, desks, or printers lying around unused? Share them with employees, or other organizations, maximizing efficiency of use.
9. myTurn offers tool sharing, like a library, for your workforce. Rather than buy everyone a scanner, buy one that everyone can use, by using inventory tracking software.
10. Co-working startups LiquidSpace, ShareDesk, PivotDesk and others, enable desk-sharing for workers seeking places to work, and for business with excess space. As work shifts to shared locations, businesses can be more flexible, offering desks on-demand.
11. CrowdFlower offers human computing on demand. Rather than hire thousands of employees to process simple tasks, you can tap an organized workforce of workers to conduct micro-tasks online, keeping your workforce focused.
12. Selfstarter, is an open source starting point that allows your business to build its own ad-hoc crowd funding website. Building your own crowd funding platform for your business that’s branded, data accessible, and less costly, you can use open source software to launch your own crowd funding site.
13. Please add other examples in the comments.

Expect Large Enterprise Software Companies to Usher in Suites
Companies are replicating the same features as the P2P commerce solutions like Airbnb, Uber, Sidecar, TaskRabbit, and Kickstarter to take advantage of this growing trend powered by new technologies. We’re at the very front end of this movement. Expect an explosion of Collaborative Economy apps and startups to emerge to serve companies as players like Uber and Airbnb and offer APIs enabling new forms of connectivity. Looking out ten years, expect software giants like SAP, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce and others to offer their own versions for corporations through replication or acquisition.

Want to learn more? Access my body of work for research, reports, presentations, frameworks, and more posts on the Collaborative Economy.

Image used under creative commons licensing by Panama.

Can big brands learn from Uber, Kickstarter, Airbnb and the Maker Movement? Yes, they can. They’re using the same strategies as those startups to connect to their markets and they are doing it at a rapid pace.

The Collaborative Economy is a movement. People are empowered to fund and build their own bespoke goods in the Maker Movement, and people are using new technologies to share what they already have in the Sharing Economy. In both cases, people are empowered to get what they need from each other – rather than buying through traditional channels.

As new business models are emerging, corporations aren’t standing by idly. They’re adapting and changing quickly. (You may access this detailed timeline.) While we’ve yet to see return on investment numbers from any of these early deployments, our research of this same sample set indicates that the frequency of brands deploying has been increasing, even before the launch of Catalyst Companies six months ago.

A bit about the data and methods: An ongoing list of efforts has been collected from industry leaders, readers, and the brands themselves. We then tagged each of the deployments into specific categories. Most case examples are tagged in more than one instance, as they have overlapping deployments. Data was collected up until April 2014, yet even more examples are emerging. We defined a corporation as “a company with characteristics of companies usually over 1000 employees or over a billion dollars gross revenue.”

Three Graphs: Corporations in the Collaborative Economy

1. Industry breakdown
2. Major strategy
3. Specific tactic(s)

Chart 1, above: Across the nearly 77 case examples up until April 2014, the greatest number of the deployments were from the retail industry, followed by the auto industry, then the technology space, then hospitality. In some cases we included consumer product goods and durable goods which impact the retail space in the frequency count.

Key findings: Companies closely related to consumer-type business models are most impacted and, therefore, have done the most deployments.

Chart 2, above: Across the broad spectrum of the collaborative economy (e.g., maker movement, crowd funding, sharing economy) corporations are employing tactics that are related to the sharing economy. The one isolated instance of a co-op, where the company is owned by the customers and employees, is REI. The second most common strategy was tapping the Maker Movement, often in the form of co-innovation, also known as outside-in innovation or other variations of that phraseology.

Key findings: Corporations gravitated towards sharing economy business models, often through sponsorships and partnerships with leading players like Uber, but this doesn’t guarantee business model resiliency beyond the media pickup.

Chart 3, above: This chart is a subset of the preceding “Strategy” breakdown, shown directly above. We found that most companies are employing “brands as a service” tactics, which means products are sent on-demand or are available as rental business models, instead of through ownership models. In particular, BMW, Peugeot and Daimler rent cars directly to drivers, and hotels like Westin and Cosmo rent workout gear and dresses on Rent The Runway, respectively.

Key findings: Brands deployed “Brand as a service” which often equates to a rental model, or on-demand model, to meet new market demands of “access over ownership.” Much of this was achieved through partnerships with players like Uber or other on-demand entities. A few companies have launched their own marketplaces or partnered with other companies that offered similar services.

Conclusion: Brands must adopt Peer to Peer Commerce Models
Large corporations continue to adopt disruptive technologies. Twenty years ago they adopted the internet. Ten years ago they adopted social media. Now, in 2014, they’re adopting the methods of the Collaborative Economy. The internet phase required an online B2C model. Social media shifted to peer-to-peer communication. In this next phase, brands must offer their own peer-with-peer-to-commerce models. In each of these phases, business model shifts and mindset changes were required, letting go of some control in order to gain more business. To learn more, find my body of work on the collaborative economy which includes research, frameworks, graphics, data, and case examples.

Above picture: Attendees of the Spring 2014 Catalyst Companies Summit hosted by Autodesk in SF included corporate business leaders, entrepreneurs from collaboartive startups and special guests.

A few days ago, Catalyst Companies reached its 6 month anniversary, so I felt that this would be a good time to provide an update on the company’s growth and on the state of the market.

The Collaborative Economy Movement is Growing Quickly. As a movement, the Collaborative Economy has demonstrated tremendous growth and market churn. This movement, which empowers people to get what they need from each other, continues to expand. There are over 9,000 startups in the space and there was over $850 million in new funding in the month of April alone. Adoption by people is projected to double by the end of 2014. The mainstream press and local media has begun to regularly spotlight the Collaborative Economy movement. It’s getting hard to open a newspaper and not read something about this subject, whether it is news or op-eds. This is a sure indication that, not only is the movement growing, it is here to stay.

Regulatory Upsets and Business Model Changes Show Disruption. Naturally, this has caused considerable disruption for some local governments, regulators, and traditional business models as power shifts hands to the people. Change is almost always met with opposition. There have been protests from incumbents like taxi and hotel unions. Many local governments have pushed back at some startups. State governments have moved in a variety of directions. On the other hand we’ve seen progressive corporations collaborate with new business models. In fact, there are over 80 examples of traditional corporations who’ve deployed in this market. Data seems to indicate that there is no end in sight to how the movement may totally reshape our world. There’s been increasing attention on the market, as conferences across the globe, like OuiShare, MakerFaire, MakerCon, SHARE, and my own Resilient Summit, launched to support new and existing players and to help them define their place and reach their growth potential within this ecosystem.

Catalyst Companies Milestones
Catalyst Companies, an association for business leaders who want to be part of this new Collaborative Economy movement, has grown as well. Here’s a few council stats:

• We launched with 24 Fortune 500 companies on Dec 10, 2013, at LeWeb.
• We’ve grown 41% in six months.
• Our membership now includes 34 major corporations, see list
• Our Council includes more 120 business leaders who are at executive, director and department head levels of their companies.
• We’ve had over a dozen collaborative, online calls and sessions, including speakers like Lisa Gansky and Mark Hatch and a number of startups from the movement.
• A representative from the White House spoke at one of our sessions, indicating the administration’s support of the Maker Movement.
• We’ve hosted three physical events, including our Spring Member Summit in San Francisco, an immersive experience hosted by Autodesk, 5M, and TechShop.
• We’ve launched a key research report in the space with partners at Vision Critical, and had media coverage in leading publications like Fast Company, Wired, and the Wall Street Journal.
• Most importantly, our members are unlocking business value from peer-to-peer connections, learning from industry experts and finding startups to with which to partner.

Looking Forward. What’s to come in the future? This market, which I see as the natural next phase to follow social media, should continue to churn as startups get funded and disrupt traditional business models. Governments at federal and local levels will continue to recalibrate how they approach this market. The people who use these services will continue to gain power and the movement will continue to formalize as a new ecosystem (unions are already starting to forge). Just as corporations changed their communication models to adapt to social media, corporations who want to succeed will adopt new business models that use these same strategies in order to partner with the crowd. Social media was a ten year growth trend. I expect this market to follow a similar pattern, but with far greater impact as the physical world is being democratized through technology.

Welcome, this industry newsletter shares key market changes, in a twice-monthly publication, curated by Jeremiah Owyang, Founder of Catalyst Companies™, you can subscribe to the email newsletter on the footer of the homepage.

The Framework Puts 90k Startups Into One Distilled Graphic

In nature, honeycombs are resilient structures that efficiently enable many individuals to access, share, and grow resources among a common group. In this visual representation, this economy is organized into 6 discrete families (goods, services, space, etc), 14 sub-classes (bespoke goods, personal services, workspace, etc) and dozens of example companies (Airbnb, Uber, Shapeways, etc). In prior taxonomies, there were five families, but now we’re seeking rapid growth in the food sector, which deserved its own hexagon.
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2014/05/05/framework-collaborative-economy-honeycomb-osfest14/

Lyft Gets Insurance From MetLife in Big Brand Deal
“MetLife has recognized the opportunity to serve Lyft users in this emerging marketplace for community-powered transportation, with millions of rides shared among users across the country.” The alliance between MetLife and Lyft may be a marriage made in Heaven. Not only is it good for both companies, but it offers confidence for Lyft drivers and clients that they are adequately protected against potential liability issues. Lyft is also demonstrating that it is a class act, by not ignoring or turning a blind eye to important regulatory and legal issues. Sharing startups would do well to follow their example of complying with standards and ordinances rather than rubbing the establishment the wrong way. Better to make friends than enemies. Read More.

Gap Offers Shared Workforce Solutions with Local Bike Sharing
In an idea that has been a long time coming, seasonal workers at Gap stores in Chicago will have the opportunity to continue working year-round, manning pickup/ drop-off stations for Divvy, a bicycle sharing service, during the Gap off-season (which happens to be Divvy’s busy season.) The formerly seasonal workers will have year-round work available without have to go through the job hunting process. The companies will benefit from having a stable, trained, available workforce. This is sharing on a grand scale. Read More.

Even the Small Cities are Getting Into Sharing
Franklin, Tennessee is a community of 62,000 located south of Nashville, not a large metropolis by any definition. So it is somewhat surprising that the town fathers are planning to create something typically seen in major cities – a bike-sharing program. Funded by a $2.9 million federal grant, 15 bike stations will be built on city property, accommodating 150 bicycles. Compare that to 20 bike-sharing stations already in use in the much larger city of Nashville. Not only will the program be an everyday convenience for locals, but it should help to reduce congestion and maintain the city’s historic look. Read More.

Catalyst Companies is Now Six Month Old with Over 40% Growth
This brand council, Catalyst Companies was launched 6 months ago on stage in Paris at famed LeWeb conference with 24 Fortune 500 corporations. A half year later, the council has grown 41% with 34 corporations and has over 110 business leaders. The council has hosted three physical meetups, hosted over a dozen online sessions, and introduced dozens of collaborative economy startups to decision makers. The council is on a mission for corporations to unlock the opportunities of the Maker Movement, Sharing Economy called the Collaborative Economy in order to further relationships with their own customers and marketplace.

Above: Version 1.0 of the Collaborative Economy Honeycomb

Understand the Collaborative Economy market in one, single image. Please share widely, with attribution, non-commercially:

• Click image to see JPG version 3,600 X 2,250

The Collaborative Economy enables people to efficiently get what they need from each other. They use powerful technologies that enable Crowdfunding, Peer-to-Peer lending, the Maker Movement, and the Sharing Economy. If you look closely, the crowd is becoming like a company: self funding, designing, producing, and sharing what they already have.

Similarly, in nature, honeycombs are resilient structures that efficiently enable many individuals to access, share, and grow resources among a common group. Various types of bees work in a collaborative manner to feed, care, and grow offspring and grow the colony. Furthermore, the honeycomb structure spreads the load across the structure, wastes little in its design, and are easy to replicate at scale.

In this visual representation, this economy is organized into 6 discrete families (goods, services, space, etc), 14 sub-classes (bespoke goods, personal services, workspace, etc) and dozens of example companies (Airbnb, Uber, Shapeways, etc). In prior taxonomies, there were five families, but now we’re seeking rapid growth in the food sector, which deserved its own hexagon.

The companies listed in this graphic are just a representation, there are over 9,000+ companies, many which vary by country and geography. To access the full directory companies visit the Mesh Index, at meshing.it/companies managed by Mesh Labs run by Lisa Gansky.

Notable Industry Stats:

• Adoption set to double, says over 90,000 respondents.
• There are over 9,000+ startups catalogued in the Mesh Index.
• Investors (like Google) are heavily funding this market, with over $850m invested in the month of April alone.
• The establishment is resisting as regulators, hotels, taxis, and others balk.
• Over 80 corporations have joined the movement, see this timeline.

One of the inspirations for this graphic was the work of former colleague and friend Brian Solis did on the first phase of sharing, which originally catalogued social media known as the Conversation Prism. While we explored a variety of ways to present the information the radial-like nature made the most sense. Brian was generous in his time providing feedback, insight, and more, based on his experience managing many variations throughout the years.

Published in celebration with today’s Ouishare Festival in Paris, with a focus on the Collaborative Economy, and the impacts it has on society. An Thank you to Lisa Gansky @instigating, Neal Gorenflo @gorenflo, Shervin Pishevar @sherpa, Mike Walsh @mwalsh, Brian Solis @briansolis, Alexandra Samuel @awsamuel, of Vision Critical @visioncritical, and Vladimir for the graphic design.

The crowd is becoming like a company.

Update: More on Facebook.