här - Media Evolution

VARFÖR av Lisa Gansky
Seriously better things,
easily shared
ost companies have stubbornly stuck to various
Mtwists on a single tried-and- true formula: Create a
product or service, sell it, and collect money. Just sell the
guy a dishwasher, and watch him walk out the door. Few
businesspeople, including most entrepreneurs and investors,
have imagined creating wealth or customers any
other way. Though they may use social media to market
their products, their minds are still stuck in a 2-D buyer/
seller/own-it world.
Yet around this entrenched way of thinking, a new model is
thriving, one that I call “the Mesh.” Enter the Mesh. That’s
what I call the rapidly growing network of sharing-based
goods and services. The Mesh is based on having convenient
access to what you need and want, without the expense
and hassles of owning more stuff.
Network-enable sharing
Fundamentally, the Mesh is based on network-enabled sharing—on
access rather than ownership. Mesh businesses
understand and cleverly exploit the perfect storm of mobile,
location-based capabilities and social network growth to
give us convenient access to what we want and need, just
when we want or need it. In my view, a major theme of the
Share Economy is ‘unused value = waste’.
In a nutshell, we, as a global community have a lot of excess
capacity: cars and bicycles sitting around, offices, factories
and tools idle and, of course, talent. As access continues to
triumph over ownership, we will continue to identify and
make available ‘unused value’ as a major fuel for our local
and global economies. This shift to the Mesh is rapidly changing
the way business is done, and it’s picking up speed.
“In a nutshell, we, as
a global community
have a lot of excess
capacity.”
Why is the Mesh growing so fast?
There are a few significant reasons: population growth, the
recession and that we are living in a time when anyone,
almost anywhere, can reach a person, company or market
faster, with far less capital required.
We now have an enhanced ability not only to leverage existing
platforms, but also to refine and test our offering more
quickly and inexpensively than ever before through social
media networks, popup shops and galleries and apps.
Some of these Mesh businesses are international enterprises
(Like ZipCar.com and LoveFilm.com). These services
own the inventory of products or facility which they then
make available to their customers via a ‘share’ or membership
model. Many other Mesh companies are two sided
marketplaces which are peer-to-peer or community based.
In other words, marketplaces which allow us to borrow,
swap and rent things from one another. These businesses
take advantage of local peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms like
Facebook and Foursquare, which make it easy to be connected
while mobile.
There are now over 6,500 share-based companies in the
Mesh community directory at Meshing.it. The competitive
advantages for Mesh companies are so enormous that
the new model has become the major driver for businesses
old and new.
Lisa Gansky is the author of The Mesh - Why the Future of Business
is Sharing
“There are now over
6,500 share-based
companies”