The collaborative economy consists of sharing between equals little-used goods or providing services of little economic value, making use of the Internet and new technologies. A more official definition is the one proposed by the National Markets Commission and Competition (CNMC), according to which this economy is a new economic model that is based on the “exchange between individuals of goods and services that remained idle or underused in exchange for compensation agreed between the parties”. In the words of the famous Rachel Bostman, author of the book “What’s Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live”, the collaborative economy is summed up in the axiom that “what’s mine is yours, in return for a small fee.” It is a new and disruptive economic model that threatens a change of era, just as social networks did in their day.
Considering how little time has elapsed since this movement began, the figures for this phenomenon are simply overwhelming. Every month more than a million travelers stay in the houses and apartments of other individuals using the platform Airbnb. A user has a spare room in his house and offers it through the platform in exchange for a small remuneration. It is no longer the large hotel chain that offers accommodation, but an individual. The experience is simply different. The company, which originated in San Francisco, currently distributes more than 650,000 spaces in more than 34,000 cities, a volume of accommodation similar to prestigious hotel chains such as Intercontinental or Hilton. In the case of Spain, according to the study published by Avancar “Trends of collaborative consumption in Spain”, 76% of the population has rented or shared some good or service on some occasion. What’s more, the Spanish State is the third most requested holiday destination in the world by Airbnb users.
This trend is not only interesting and attractive for users, but there are also many investors who participate in the benefits of collaborative consumption. And it is that the companies dedicated to the collaborative economy are obtaining such impressive results that investors have not been able to avoid paying attention to this new sector. To give a clearer idea of these great results: Blablacar obtained in 2014 100 million dollars in its last round of investment. Airbnb and Uber, meanwhile, raised $450 million and $1.2 billion, respectively. Speaking in market terms, the numbers are just as impressive. Airbnb, in just 6 years (it was founded in 2008), has reached a valuation of more than 10,000 million dollars; while Uber, the company so reviled by the taxi union and of which Google is the main shareholder, is valued at a whopping 45,000 million dollars.
This new era of the collaborative economy represents a cultural change that implies a transition from an economy of ownership and possession to an economy of access and community culture. We no longer buy objects that we are only going to use a couple of times in our lives and the only thing they will do is collect dust in a storage room, but we access that object in question by paying one of our neighbors, acquaintances, etc. a small amount when we really need it.