The Financial Times carried an article recently studying the Sony company, as they seek a return to the glory days of the Walkman. The new cheif executive talked about ‘collaborating to belong.’
Collaboration is central to a new wave of partnerships and working together – be with your operations division or your distribution channels. As technology shrinks the world, it is reinventing old forms of trust, where in many cases ‘using’ becomes more important than ‘having’ things. The importance of owning actual physical stuff is diminishing and having a physical product in our hands is not as important as the experience.
Sites such as NeighborGoods, ShareSomeSugar and SnapGoods allow us to lend and borrow everything we need within a community. The average household power drill is only used for 20 minutes in its entire lifetime, a lawn mower used for some 4 hours per year, so we do we all feel compelled to own one? These sites are redefining how we perceive ownership and nobody does it better than ZipCar. For every person that uses the service for their transport needs, between 6-8 give up owning their own vehicle. It makes sense. That is the future.
