What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption

A key to a product service system’s success is its ability to satisfy our deep-seated need to feel like an owner for at least the time the product is in our care. Companies achieve this feeling of ownership through discreet branding of the service on the product itself (the Bag Borrow or Steal logo is never visible on the outside of the bag) or bui

“Everything about our company is our brand.” Airbnb’s founders see the company’s role as empowering the host to create the optimal experience. From advice on the types of photos to post and descriptions to leave to a kit of suggestions of the little things hosts can do, such as place a mint on the guest pillow, their goal is to make the user, and t

The entrepreneurs discovered that the problems plaguing existing online children’s swap sites were twofold: inconvenience and poor quality. The team had already solved the first problem with the original thredUp model, building an easy-to-use interface and prepaid envelope system that made the experience feel similar to Netflix. But ensuring qualit

Once users have reached a certain amount of points, they receive a star indicating their trustworthiness. The “Red Shooting Star” is the very highest, for 100,000 points or more, and the “Yellow Star” is the starting point, for 10 to 49 points. Just as we rate songs on iTunes or films on Netflix or write reviews on TripAdvisor and Amazon, these ind

“Can you imagine when we reach a point where not owning a car becomes the ultimate luxury and its own kind of status symbol?”28 This transition has started.

community among members, and to tailor recommendations to individual tastes.

some form of payment “puts both parties on the best behavior and makes the whole process more reliable.”

Services such as Zipcar, Bag Borrow and Steal, SolarCity, and DenimTherapy are not reinventing their industry’s product but reimagining the larger system within which their product operates.

powerfully bind us together. Mark Granovetter, a sociologist at Stanford University, named this force “the strength of weak ties,”32 social relationships of people whom we don’t know that can bolster an individual’s prospects and well-being.33 It