Collaborative Economy - Concept

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1. By the Collaborative Economy Coalition:

"Collaborative Consumption, originally coined by Rachel Botsman in her transformative book What’s Mine is (Y)ours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, is an economic model that leverages communities or crowds to rent, share, swap, barter, trade, or sell access to products or services."

— was at

2. By Ouishare:

"The collaborative economy is defined as practices and business models based on horizontal networks and participation of a community, It is built on "distributed power and trust within communities as opposed to centralized institutions" (R. Botsman), blurring the lines between producer and consumer. These communities meet and interact on online networks and peer-to-peer platforms, as well as in shared spaces such as fablabs and coworking spaces." (visited 2014)

3. By Investopedia:

"A collaborative economy is a marketplace where consumers rely on each other instead of large companies to meet their wants and needs. Collaborative economies consist of giving, swapping, borrowing, trading, renting, and sharing products and services for a fee, between an individual who has something and an individual who needs something — generally with the help of a web-based middleman. A collaborative economy may also be known as a "shared economy," "sharing economy" or a "peer-to-peer economy." " (visited 2019-07)


1. According to the Collaborative Economy Coalition

There are these "Different Types of Collaborative Platforms":


P2P business models allow everyday citizens to rent, sell and share their homes, cars, bikes and services. These platforms allow families to create income out of otherwise non-producing assets, while giving consumers an alternative to services that are otherwise prohibitively expensive for them. Some P2P platforms allow consumers to directly buy professional creative and logistical services, while others empower citizens to give loans and startup capital to aspiring small business people across America and the developing world.


Crowdsourcing platforms create a pure competitive marketplace for creative talent and services. These platforms allow consumers to easily announce their creative or logistical needs to the crowd, and then choose the highest quality and most competitively priced submission.

Collaborative online markets

Online marketplaces provide individuals access to globalization. Some online markets like Etsy provide a platform for consumers to buy directly from small businesses and artisans, allowing those small businesses to scale up their production and compete with mega-retailers. Other platforms allow consumers to sell, rent, and buy pre-owned goods, thus creating cashflow for families and a market for affordable items.

Group Purchasing Platforms

Some collaborative models use technology to allow consumers to leverage group bargaining and increase their purchasing power by connecting consumers with similar interests. These models aim to create perfect equilibrium of supply and demand, allowing small businesses to scale their businesses rapidly while also providing consumers the most competitive prices possible."

2. From Ouishare

"This phenomena can be seen as the sum of the following developments:

The Sharing Economy aka Collaborative Consumption

Collaborative consumption is the seamless circulation of products and services among individuals through sharing, swapping, trading, renting, borrowing or giving, fostering access over ownership and reducing waste.

Crowdfunding and Person-to-Person Banking

Crowdfunding and person-to-person banking enable the circulation of capital between individuals to fund creative, social and entrepreneurial projects.

Open Knowledge

Open knowledge enables anyone to freely use, reuse, and redistribute knowledge such as content, data, code or designs. This principle is the foundation of commons-based peer production (such as free software, the creative commons, open science, …) as well as open education, open data and open governance.

Makers, Open Design & Manufacturing

Open design and manufacturing democratize the process of designing, producing and distributing physical goods by combining open knowledge with distributed infrastructures. They rely on tools, spaces, communities and marketplaces and are fueled by the maker movement, the culture of hacking and Do-It-Yourself (DIY).

Open and Horizontal Governance

Open and horizontal governance are transforming organizations, public services and civic action. Leading examples include civic engagement platforms, participatory budgeting, open government initiatives, co-operatives, open value networks, horizontal organizations, swarms, do-ocracries and holacracies."

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