The Collaborative Economy Is Changing Everything
Collaborative economy is when consumers can get whatever they want from each other, without depending on large organizations.
Wikipedia has a really good explanation of what the sharing economy is: "The sharing economy (sometimes also referred to as the peer-to-peer economy, mesh, collaborative economy, collaborative consumption) is a socio-economic system built around the sharing of human and physical resources. It includes the shared creation, production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods and services by different people and organizations. These systems take a variety of forms, often leveraging information technology to empower individuals, corporations, non-profits and government with information that enables distribution, sharing and reuse of excess capacity in goods and services. A common premise is that when information about goods is shared, the value of those goods may increase, for the business, for individuals, and for the community."
Looking to the market today, we can see that collaborative economy is moving from an income boost in a stagnant wage market to a disruptive economic force, as it allows people to become microentrepreneurs, helping each other directly.
By doing so, it generates some impacts in other areas also. The social impact is that gives people an alternative job instead of depending only on large corporations. Sustainability is another factor, as by sharing what they have, people make it unnecessary for others to own that same thing.
As a matter of fact, people are become empowered by these new opportunities and as companies need more talented people than talented people need companies, they found that they can have more flexibility by sharing their talents. The trend now is that the employer-employee scenario change to a partnership between companies and people that offer their products or services.
One major risk that emerges from this is that people, as free-lancers, lose their employee benefits, but some free-lancer associations are rising to offer the same kind of benefits a regular employee from a large company has.
On the long run, people tend to own less things, as they have access to what they want or need by sharing everything with others. This turns out to be good for everyone and for the planet too, as the demand for one product for each one is no longer viable and the production numbers fall, less damage to the planet is made.
The best advice for people and for companies that want to be involved in collaborative economy is to try some of the services and products that are already available and change their business model to adapt to this new reality, so everyone can benefit from all these advantages.
Nobiletec is a multi-national consultancy firm specializes in B2B, B2C and P2P FinTech solutions.
