Favourable price and quick service is the key to sharing economy

The “sharing economy” is a term frequently incorrectly applied to ideas where there is an efficient model of matching supply with demand, but zero sharing and collaboration involved. Platforms such as Washio, Deskbeers, Dashdoor, and WunWun that require the tap of an app to instantly access a clean shirt, massage, or keg of beer are fundamentally different from platforms like BlaBlaCar or RelayRides, which are genuinely built on the sharing of underused assets. Pizza Hut and Amazon one-hour delivery aren’t the sharing economy, and these on-demand apps are no different; they are mobile-driven versions of point-to-point delivery. They’re thrown under the same umbrella as part of the sea change in consumer behavior that uses the smartphone as a remote control to efficiently access things in the real world.

This muddiness in terminology is partly coming from Uber. The experience of using geolocation and frictionless payments to change our ability to get a taxi is creating a transformation in terms of how we expect and want to access everything from getting a parcel shipped on Shyp to a dog walked on Wag, with a tap of a screen. But the Uberfication of everything brings with it confusion about what is true sharing.
Key Criteria

When we ask ourselves whether a company is in or out of the sharing economy family, maybe it is better to try to filter them against clear criteria versus definitions. I think there are five key ingredients to truly collaborative, sharing-driven companies.

The core business idea involves unlocking the value of unused or under-utilized assets (“idling capacity”) whether it’s for monetary or non-monetary benefits.
The company should have a clear values-driven mission and be built on meaningful principles including transparency, humanness, and authenticity that inform short and long-term strategic decisions.
The providers on the supply-side should be valued, respected, and empowered and the companies committed to making the lives of these providers economically and socially better.
The customers on the demand side of the platforms should benefit from the ability to get goods and services in more efficient ways that mean they pay for access instead of ownership.
The business should be built on distributed marketplaces or decentralized networks that create a sense of belonging, collective accountability and mutual benefit through the community they build.

Perhaps we should be working towards a certification system that recognizes true “sharing,” “collaborative,” and “peer” platforms. Indeed, Debbie Woskow, author of “Unlocking the Sharing Economy: An Independent Review,” is working on an industry-wide ‘kite mark’ for responsible sharing economy companies in the U.K.