Robin Chase - Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism

Peers Inc

Peers Inc

How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism

R OBIN C HASE

Copyright 2015 by Robin Chase.

Published in the United States by PublicAffairs, a Member of the Perseus Books Group

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Book Design by Milenda Lee

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015934541

ISBN 978-1-61039-554-0 (HC)

ISBN 978-1-61039-555-7 (EB)

First Edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the heroes: the entrepreneurs, change makers, and nurturers building us all a sustainable world.

CONTENTS

My Three Theses

Abundance in a World of Scarcity

Simplify, Organize, Empower

Localize, Customize, Specialize

The Three Miracles

Learning, Power Sharing, and Building a Peers Inc Organization

Engaging Government

Evolving Legacy Institutions

Democratizing Power and Wealth

Climate Change and Sustainability Need Peers Inc

The Collaborative Economy

BACK IN 2000, sleepless at night during the early months of building Zipcar, I had a recurring nightmare. Lying in bed next to my husband, I imagined the mafiathe rental car mafiabursting through the door, black machine guns bearing down on us. I understood clearly that we were on a path that was going to break a hundred-year-old industry.

What I failed to appreciate back then was the much larger movement made possible by the Internet. Zipcar was a trailblazer. When you can connect and share assets, people, and ideas, everything changes, not just how you rent a car. Google, eBay, Facebook, OKCupid, YouTube, Waze, Airbnb, WhatsApp, Duolingoall are part of this transformation of capitalism. Web 2.0, the sharing economy, crowdsourcing, collaborative production, collaborative consumption, and network effects are simply terms weve created along the way in an effort to capture what is going on. Attributing all this to the Internet misses the building blocks and therefore the ability to replicate this type of activity in a more controlled way. There is one structure that underlies all theseexcess capacity + a platform for participation + diverse peersand it is fundamentally changing the way we work, build businesses, and shape economies. I call it Peers Inc.

Peers Inc combines the best of people power with the best of corporate power. One can think of it as using every resource and every stakeholder efficiently. The Inc delivers only on industrial strengths (that require significant scale and resources), and the Peers deliver on their individual strengths (localization, specialization, customization). When Incs and peers focus only on what they do best, each handling what is difficult, annoying, or just plain impossible for the other, the resulting collaboration is compelling and sometimes miraculous.

In a world of scarcity, Peers Inc organizations create abundance. Harnessing resources we already havephysical assets, skills, networks, devices, data, experiences, processesthese organizations grow efficiently, and sometimes exponentially. Peers Inc redefines our understanding of assetsproprietary versus in common, private versus public, commercial use versus personal useand requires a rethinking of regulations, insurance, and governance. Tapping into a diversity of peers, these organizations are creative and have the potential to learn exponentially. Peers Inc rewrites the rules for value creation: Shared resources unlock the greatest efficiencies, shared minds the greatest innovation.

Peers Inc is driving the transition from the industrial to the collaborative economy. The old economy was built upon the idea that wealth is created by hoarding assets and selling them off bit by bit. This is why we invented patents, copyrights, trade secrets, certifications, and credentials. It is also why I owned my own car and why I bought hundreds of records. We all hoarded stuff, kept it close, and locked it up, because we believed that this was the way we (individuals, corporations, institutions, governments) would reap the most value. The result was an enormous loss of potentialexcess capacity just yearning to find the light of day. When we look deeply into the whys and hows of Peers Inc accomplishments, we see again and again that open and connected assets and minds result in the greatest value.

In our volatile world, Peers Inc collaborations can create change with a pace, scale, and quality we previously thought impossible. Creativity, innovation, resilience, and redundancy are intrinsic to every Peers Inc endeavor. This is the structure for our times: With it we can experiment, iterate, adapt, and evolve, quickly. We can solve large problems cost-effectively and rapidly. We can scale globally yet adapt to the very local. The old industrial model cannot solve climate change. It is too slow, too inefficient, too exclusive. Peers Inc is driving the rapid transformation of our economy and will also provide an answer to the conundrum of disappearing jobs, escalating income inequality, and devastating resource scarcity.

What we do now will have profound and lasting effects on our future. We are at the end of the old fossil-fuel-saturated, consumption-based industrial economy. We are at the beginning of the new collaborative economy, which thrives on sharing, openness, and connectedness. What we choose to leave behind and how we prepare for the new will determine whether we make this transition in time and how many people we help cross the chasm. Its an all-hands-on-deck moment.

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

Entrepreneurs, businesspeople, the digerati, the revolutionaries, policymakers, and the naturally curious should all find novel, thought-provoking ideas within. The arc of the book runs like this:

Part I: The Building Blocks

(the three miracles): This is one of my favorite chapters and the fulcrum on which this book pivots.

Part II: Execution

(legacy institutions) provide concrete ways to act on this new paradigm, and, of course, lots of stories. Chapter conclusions propose unconventional policy recommendations that build on each other. I was surprised where writing this book led me!

is all about the power of money and funding. If you are looking to stir up the revolution, this chapter has the seeds for how to work around the status quo.

is one of the reasons I wrote this book. It lays out the case for how the Peers Inc structure is the only way we are going to meet the speed, scale, and local adaptation requirements to address climate change in time to prevent the catastrophic change that weve set in motion. This chapter is both sobering and optimistic.