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.