You have probably realised, Cityhop co-founder Victoria Carter is a big fan of TED! TED is a website with amazing thinkers and researchers sharing information.
Today while researching more on car share and how to encourage more people that car share works, I found an article on Treehugger and a TED clip by Rachel Botsman on how Collaborative consumerism will change the world.
It’s a fascinating clip on how what’s mine could be yours too.
“The rise of lending libraries, swapping sites, and product as a service systems over the last 5 years or so has been impressive. We’ve seen an upswing in everything from clothing swap parties to local rental communities, to big services like Zipcar (a car share service a lot bigger than cityhop!) for getting around without having to own a car.
Cityhop has blogged about other sharing services- rooms in local people’s homes instead of hotel rooms.
Rachel’s Ted piece is about so much more than sharing. Collaborative sharing is usually associated with things like car share - where traditionally individual items require a ’mindset change.’ For example, “car sharing where users think twice about whether they need to drive and thereby reduce their miles travelled by an approximated 45%.”
But collaborative sharing has such greater opportunities.
Says Rachel,”All around us, we are surrounded by stuff that has what I call ‘idling capacity’, the untapped value of unused or underused assets. There are different kinds of idling capacity. Products that are underutilized (e.g. the average car that sits parked for 23 hours a day); products that fulfill a temporary need (e.g. baby goods and clothes): or those that diminish in appeal and value after usage (e.g. a movie or a book). At the heart of Collaborative Consumption is how we can use the latest technologies to redistribute ‘idling capacity’ and maximize usage.”
