WEBVTT

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So today I'm going to talk to you

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about the rise of collaborative consumption.

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I'm going to explain what it is

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and try and convince you -- in just 15 minutes --

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that this isn't a flimsy idea,

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or a short-term trend,

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but a powerful cultural and economic force

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reinventing not just what we consume,

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but how we consume.

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Now I'm going to start with a deceptively simple example.

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Hands up -- how many of you

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have books, CDs, DVDs, or videos

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lying around your house

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that you probably won't use again,

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but you can't quite bring yourself to throw away?

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Can't see all the hands,

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but it looks like all of you, right?

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On our shelves at home,

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we have a box set of the DVD series "24,"

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season six to be precise.

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I think it was bought for us around three years ago for a Christmas present.

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Now my husband, Chris, and I

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love this show.

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But let's face it, when you've watched it once maybe, or twice,

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you don't really want to watch it again,

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because you know how Jack Bauer is going to defeat the terrorists.

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So there it sits on our shelves

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obsolete to us,

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but with immediate latent value to someone else.

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Now before we go on, I have a confession to make.

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I lived in New York for 10 years,

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and I am a big fan of "Sex and the City."

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Now I'd love to watch the first movie again

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as sort of a warm-up to the sequel coming out next week.

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So how easily could I swap

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our unwanted copy of "24"

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for a wanted copy of "Sex and the City?"

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Now you may have noticed

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there's a new sector emerging called swap-trading.

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Now the easiest analogy for swap-trading

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is like an online dating service

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for all your unwanted media.

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What it does is use the Internet

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to create an infinite marketplace

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to match person A's "haves"

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with person C's "wants,"

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whatever they may be.

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The other week, I went on one of these sites,

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appropriately called Swaptree,

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and there were over 59,300 items

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that I could instantly swap

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for my copy of "24."

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Lo and behold,

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there in Reseda, CA was Rondoron

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who wanted swap his or her

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"like new" copy of "Sex and the City"

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for my copy of "24."

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So in other words, what's happening here

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is that Swaptree

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solves my carrying company's sugar rush problem,

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a problem the economists call "the coincidence of wants,"

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in approximately 60 seconds.

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What's even more amazing is it will print out a postage label on the spot,

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because it knows the way of the item.

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Now there are layers of technical wonder

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behind sites such as Swaptree,

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but that's not my interest,

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and nor is swap trading, per se.

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My passion, and what I've spent the last few years

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dedicated to researching,

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is the collaborative behaviors and trust-mechanics

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inherent in these systems.

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When you think about it,

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it would have seemed like a crazy idea, even a few years ago,

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that I would swap my stuff with a total stranger

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whose real name I didn't know

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and without any money changing hands.

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Yet 99 percent of trades on Swaptree

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happen successfully,

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and the one percent that receive a negative rating,

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it's for relatively minor reasons,

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like the item didn't arrive on time.

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So what's happening here?

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An extremely powerful dynamic

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that has huge commercial and cultural implications

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is at play.

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Namely, that technology

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is enabling

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trust between strangers.

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We now live in a global village

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where we can mimic the ties

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that used to happen face to face,

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but on a scale and in ways

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that have never been possible before.

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So what's actually happening

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is that social networks and real-time technologies

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are taking us back.

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We're bartering, trading,

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swapping, sharing,

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but they're being reinvented

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into dynamic and appealing forms.

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What I find fascinating

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is that we've actually wired our world to share,

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whether that's our neighborhood, our school,

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our office, or our Facebook network,

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and that's creating an economy

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of "what's mine is yours."

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From the mighty eBay,

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the grandfather of exchange marketplaces,

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to car-sharing companies such as GoGet,

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where you pay a monthly fee to rent cars by the hour,

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to social lending platforms such as Zopa,

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that will take anyone in this audience

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with 100 dollars to lend,

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and match them with a borrower anywhere in the world,

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we're sharing and collaborating again

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in ways that I believe

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are more hip than hippie.

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I call this "groundswell collaborative consumption."

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Now before I dig into the different systems

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of collaborative consumption,

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I'd like to try and answer the question

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that every author rightfully gets asked,

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which is, where did this idea come from?

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Now I'd like to say I woke up one morning

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and said, "I'm going to write about collaborative consumption,"

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but actually it was a complicated web

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of seemingly disconnected ideas.

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Over the next minute,

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you're going to see a bit like a conceptual fireworks display

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of all the dots that went on in my head.

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The first thing I began to notice:

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how many big concepts were emerging --

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from the wisdom of crowds to smart mobs --

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around how ridiculously easy it is

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to form groups for a purpose.

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And linked to this crowd mania

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were examples all around the world --

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from the election of a president

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to the infamous Wikipedia, and everything in between --

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on what the power of numbers could achieve.

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Now, you know when you learn a new word,

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and then you start to see that word everywhere?

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That's what happened to me

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when I noticed that we are moving

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from passive consumers

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to creators,

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to highly enabled collaborators.

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What's happening

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is the Internet is removing the middleman,

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so that anyone from a T-shirt designer

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to a knitter

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can make a living selling peer-to-peer.

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And the ubiquitous force

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of this peer-to-peer revolution

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means that sharing is happening at phenomenal rates.

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I mean, it's amazing to think

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that, in every single minute of this speech,

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25 hours

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of YouTube video will be loaded.

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Now what I find fascinating about these examples

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is how they're actually tapping into

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our primate instincts.

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I mean, we're monkeys,

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and we're born and bred to share and cooperate.

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And we were doing so for thousands of years,

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whether it's when we hunted in packs,

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or farmed in cooperatives,

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before this big system called hyper-consumption came along

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and we built these fences

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and created out own little fiefdoms.

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But things are changing,

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and one of the reasons why

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is the digital natives, or Gen-Y.

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They're growing up sharing --

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files, video games, knowledge.

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It's second nature to them.

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So we, the millennials -- I am just a millennial --

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are like foot soldiers,

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moving us from a culture of "me" to a culture of "we."

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The reason why it's happening so fast

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is because of mobile collaboration.

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We now live in a connected age

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where we can locate anyone, anytime, in real-time,

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from a small device in our hands.

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All of this was going through my head

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towards the end of 2008,

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when, of course, the great financial crash happened.

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Thomas Friedman is one of my favorite New York Times columnists,

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and he poignantly commented

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that 2008 is when we hit a wall,

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when Mother Nature and the market

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both said, "No more."

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Now we rationally know

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that an economy built on hyper-consumption

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is a Ponzi scheme. It's a house of cards.

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Yet, it's hard for us to individually know what to do.

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So all of this is a lot of twittering, right?

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Well it was a lot of noise and complexity in my head,

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until actually I realized it was happening

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because of four key drivers.

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One, a renewed belief in the importance of community,

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and a very redefinition of what friend and neighbor really means.

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A torrent of peer-to-peer social networks

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and real-time technologies,

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fundamentally changing the way we behave.

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Three, pressing unresolved environmental concerns.

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And four, a global recession

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that has fundamentally shocked

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consumer behaviors.

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These four drivers

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are fusing together

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and creating the big shift --

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away from the 20th century,

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defined by hyper-consumption,

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towards the 21st century,

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defined by collaborative consumption.

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I generally believe we're at an inflection point

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where the sharing behaviors --

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through sites such as Flickr and Twitter

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that are becoming second nature online --

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are being applied to offline areas of our everyday lives.

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From morning commutes to the way fashion is designed

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to the way we grow food,

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we are consuming and collaborating once again.

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So my co-author, Roo Rogers, and I

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have actually gathered thousands of examples

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from all around the world of collaborative consumption.

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And although they vary enormously

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in scale, maturity and purpose,

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when we dived into them,

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we realized that they could actually be organized into three clear systems.

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The first is redistribution markets.

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Redistribution markets, just like Swaptree,

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are when you take a used, or pre-owned, item

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and move it from where it's not needed

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to somewhere, or someone, where it is.

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They're increasingly thought of as the fifth 'R' --

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reduce, reuse, recycle, repair

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and redistribute --

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because they stretch the life cycle of a product

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and thereby reduce waste.

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The second is collaborative lifestyles.

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This is the sharing of resources

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of things like money, skills and time.

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I bet, in a couple of years,

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that phrases like "coworking"

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and "couchsurfing" and "time banks"

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are going to become a part of everyday vernacular.

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One of my favorite examples of collaborative lifestyles

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is called Landshare.

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It's a scheme in the U.K.

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that matches Mr. Jones,

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with some spare space in his back garden,

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with Mrs. Smith, a would-be grower.

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Together they grow their own food.

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It's one of those ideas that's so simple, yet brilliant,

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you wonder why it's never been done before.

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Now, the third system

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is product-service systems.

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This is where you pay for the benefit of the product --

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what it does for you --

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without needing to own the product outright.

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This idea is particularly powerful

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for things that have

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high-idling capacity.

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And that can be anything from baby goods

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to fashions to --

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how many of you have a power drill,

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own a power drill? Right.

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That power drill will be used around 12 to 13 minutes

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in its entire lifetime.

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(Laughter)

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It's kind of ridiculous, right?

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Because what you need is the hole, not the drill.

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(Laughter)

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(Applause)

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So why don't you rent the drill,

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or, even better, rent out your own drill to other people

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and make some money from it?

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These three systems are coming together,

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allowing people to share resources

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without sacrificing their lifestyles,

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or their cherished personal freedoms.

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I'm not asking people

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to share nicely in the sandpit.

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So I want to just give you an example

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of how powerful collaborative consumption can be

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to change behaviors.

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The average car

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costs 8,000 dollars a year to run.

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Yet, that car sits idle

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for 23 hours a day.

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So when you consider these two facts,

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it starts to make a little less sense

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that we have to own one outright.

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So this is where car-sharing companies

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such as Zipcar and GoGet come in.

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In 2009,

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Zipcar took 250 participants

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from across 13 cities --

00:11:53.000 --> 00:11:55.000
and they're all self-confessed car addicts

00:11:55.000 --> 00:11:57.000
and car-sharing rookies --

00:11:57.000 --> 00:12:00.000
and got them to surrender their keys for a month.

00:12:00.000 --> 00:12:02.000
Instead, these people had to walk,

00:12:02.000 --> 00:12:04.000
bike, take the train,

00:12:04.000 --> 00:12:06.000
or other forms of public transport.

00:12:06.000 --> 00:12:08.000
They could only use their Zipcar membership

00:12:08.000 --> 00:12:10.000
when absolutely necessary.

00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:13.000
The results of this challenge after just one month

00:12:13.000 --> 00:12:15.000
was staggering.

00:12:15.000 --> 00:12:17.000
It's amazing that 413 lbs were lost

00:12:17.000 --> 00:12:20.000
just from the extra exercise.

00:12:20.000 --> 00:12:22.000
But my favorite statistic

00:12:22.000 --> 00:12:24.000
is that 100

00:12:24.000 --> 00:12:27.000
out of the 250 participants

00:12:27.000 --> 00:12:30.000
did not want their keys back.

00:12:30.000 --> 00:12:32.000
In other words, the car addicts

00:12:32.000 --> 00:12:34.000
had lost their urge to own.

NOTE Paragraph

00:12:34.000 --> 00:12:37.000
Now products-service systems have been around for years.

00:12:37.000 --> 00:12:39.000
Just think of libraries and laundrettes.

00:12:39.000 --> 00:12:41.000
But I think they're entering a new age,

00:12:41.000 --> 00:12:43.000
because technology makes sharing

00:12:43.000 --> 00:12:45.000
frictionless and fun.

00:12:45.000 --> 00:12:48.000
There's a great quote that was written in the New York Times

00:12:48.000 --> 00:12:50.000
that said, "Sharing is to ownership

00:12:50.000 --> 00:12:53.000
what the iPod is to the 8-track,

00:12:53.000 --> 00:12:56.000
what solar power is to the coal mine."

00:12:56.000 --> 00:12:59.000
I believe also, our generation,

00:12:59.000 --> 00:13:02.000
our relationship to satisfying what we want

00:13:02.000 --> 00:13:04.000
is far less tangible

00:13:04.000 --> 00:13:06.000
than any other previous generation.

00:13:06.000 --> 00:13:09.000
I don't want the DVD; I want the movie it carries.

00:13:09.000 --> 00:13:11.000
I don't want a clunky answering machine;

00:13:11.000 --> 00:13:13.000
I want the message it saves.

00:13:13.000 --> 00:13:16.000
I don't want a CD; I want the music it plays.

00:13:16.000 --> 00:13:19.000
In other words, I don't want stuff;

00:13:19.000 --> 00:13:22.000
I want the needs or experiences it fulfills.

00:13:22.000 --> 00:13:25.000
This is fueling a massive shift

00:13:25.000 --> 00:13:27.000
from where usage trumps possessions --

00:13:27.000 --> 00:13:30.000
or as Kevin Kelly, the editor of Wired magazine, puts it,

00:13:30.000 --> 00:13:33.000
"where access is better than ownership."

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:33.000 --> 00:13:35.000
Now as our possessions

00:13:35.000 --> 00:13:37.000
dematerialize into the cloud,

00:13:37.000 --> 00:13:39.000
a blurry line is appearing

00:13:39.000 --> 00:13:41.000
between what's mine, what's yours,

00:13:41.000 --> 00:13:43.000
and what's ours.

00:13:43.000 --> 00:13:45.000
I want to give you one example

00:13:45.000 --> 00:13:48.000
that shows how fast this evolution is happening.

00:13:48.000 --> 00:13:51.000
This represents an eight-year time span.

00:13:51.000 --> 00:13:54.000
We've gone from traditional car-ownership

00:13:54.000 --> 00:13:57.000
to car-sharing companies, such as Zipcar and GoGet,

00:13:57.000 --> 00:14:00.000
to ride-sharing platforms that match rides

00:14:00.000 --> 00:14:03.000
to the newest entry, which is peer-to-peer car rental,

00:14:03.000 --> 00:14:06.000
where you can actually make money

00:14:06.000 --> 00:14:09.000
out of renting that car that sits idle for 23 hours a day

00:14:09.000 --> 00:14:11.000
to your neighbor.

00:14:11.000 --> 00:14:13.000
Now all of these systems

00:14:13.000 --> 00:14:15.000
require a degree of trust,

00:14:15.000 --> 00:14:17.000
and the cornerstone to this working

00:14:17.000 --> 00:14:19.000
is reputation.

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:19.000 --> 00:14:21.000
Now in the old consumer system,

00:14:21.000 --> 00:14:23.000
our reputation didn't matter so much,

00:14:23.000 --> 00:14:25.000
because our credit history was far more important

00:14:25.000 --> 00:14:28.000
that any kind of peer-to-peer review.

00:14:28.000 --> 00:14:31.000
But now with the Web, we leave a trail.

00:14:31.000 --> 00:14:34.000
With every spammer we flag,

00:14:34.000 --> 00:14:37.000
with every idea we post, comment we share,

00:14:37.000 --> 00:14:39.000
we're actually signaling how well we collaborate,

00:14:39.000 --> 00:14:42.000
and whether we can or can't be trusted.

00:14:42.000 --> 00:14:44.000
Let's go back to my first example,

00:14:44.000 --> 00:14:46.000
Swaptree.

00:14:46.000 --> 00:14:48.000
I can see that Rondoron

00:14:48.000 --> 00:14:51.000
has completed 553 trades

00:14:51.000 --> 00:14:54.000
with a 100 percent success rate.

00:14:54.000 --> 00:14:57.000
In other words, I can trust him or her.

00:14:58.000 --> 00:15:00.000
Now mark my words,

00:15:00.000 --> 00:15:02.000
it's only a matter of time

00:15:02.000 --> 00:15:05.000
before we're going to be able to perform a Google-like search

00:15:05.000 --> 00:15:07.000
and see a cumulative picture

00:15:07.000 --> 00:15:09.000
of our reputation capital.

00:15:09.000 --> 00:15:11.000
And this reputation capital

00:15:11.000 --> 00:15:14.000
will determine our access to collaborative consumption.

00:15:14.000 --> 00:15:16.000
It's a new social currency, so to speak,

00:15:16.000 --> 00:15:19.000
that could become as powerful as our credit rating.

NOTE Paragraph

00:15:20.000 --> 00:15:22.000
Now as a closing thought,

00:15:22.000 --> 00:15:25.000
I believe we're actually in a period

00:15:25.000 --> 00:15:27.000
where we're waking up

00:15:27.000 --> 00:15:29.000
from this humongous hangover

00:15:29.000 --> 00:15:31.000
of emptiness and waste,

00:15:31.000 --> 00:15:33.000
and we're taking a leap

00:15:33.000 --> 00:15:35.000
to create a more sustainable system

00:15:35.000 --> 00:15:37.000
built to serve our innate needs

00:15:37.000 --> 00:15:40.000
for community and individual identity.

00:15:40.000 --> 00:15:42.000
I believe it will be referred to

00:15:42.000 --> 00:15:44.000
as a revolution, so to speak --

00:15:44.000 --> 00:15:47.000
when society, faced with great challenges,

00:15:47.000 --> 00:15:49.000
made a seismic shift

00:15:49.000 --> 00:15:51.000
from individual getting and spending

00:15:51.000 --> 00:15:54.000
towards a rediscovery of collective good.

00:15:54.000 --> 00:15:57.000
I'm on a mission to make sharing cool.

00:15:57.000 --> 00:15:59.000
I'm on a mission to make sharing hip.

00:15:59.000 --> 00:16:01.000
Because I really believe

00:16:01.000 --> 00:16:03.000
it can disrupt outdated modes of business,

00:16:03.000 --> 00:16:05.000
help us leapfrog

00:16:05.000 --> 00:16:07.000
over wasteful forms of hyper-consumption

00:16:07.000 --> 00:16:10.000
and teach us when enough really is enough.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:10.000 --> 00:16:12.000
Thank you very much.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:12.000 --> 00:16:14.000
(Applause)