[applause]

Thanks for setting high expectations Remo [laughs], always good...um, so today I'm going to talk

to you about the rise of collaborative consumption. I'm going to explain what it is, and try and

convince you (in just 15 minutes) that this isn't a flimsy idea,

or a short term trend, but a powerful cultural economic force,

re-inventing not just what we consume, but how we consume.

Now I'm going to start with a deceptively simple example.

Hands up how many of you have books, cds, dvds or videos,

lying around your house, that you probably won't use again,

but you can't quite bring yourself to throw away?

Can't see all the hands, but it looks like all of you, right?

Um, on our shelves at home, we have a box set of the dvd,

dvd series 24 (season 6 to be precise).

Um, I think it was bought for us around 3 years ago for a Christmas present.

Now, my husband Chris and I love this show. But let's face it, when you've watched it

once, maybe, or twice, you don't really want to watch it again,

Because you know how Jack Bauer's going to defeat the terrorist.

So there it sits, on our shelves, whoops, um, obsolete

to us, but with immediate latent value to someone else.

Now before we go on, I have a confession to make.

I lived in New York for 10 years, and I am a big fan

of Sex and the City. Now, I'd love to watch the first movie again,

as sort of a warm up to the sequel coming out next week,

so how easily could I swap our unwanted copy of 24,

for a wanted copy of Sex and the City?

Now you may have noticed there's a new sector emerging

at the moment called "swap-trading".

Now, the easiest analogy for swap-trading is like,

um, an online dating service for all your unwanted media.

What it does is use the internet to create an infinite market

place to match person A's haves with person C's wants,

whatever they may be. The other week, I went on one of these

sites (appropriately called "Swaptree")

and there were over fifty-nine thousand, three hundred items

that I could instantly swap for my copy of 24.

Low and behold, there in Resdy, California, was Rondoron,

who wanted to swap his or her "like new" copy

of Sex and the City for my copy of 24. So in other words,

what's happening here, is that Swaptree solves my Carrie

and company sugar rush problem, a problem the economists

call "coincidence of wants"- in approximately 60 seconds.

What's even more amazing is that it'll print out a postage

label on the spot because it knows the weight of the item.

Now there are layers of technical wonder behind such sites

such as Swaptree, but that's not my interest,

and nor is swap-trading per se. My passion, and what I've spent

the last few years dedicated to researching,

are the collaborative behaviours and trust mechanics inherent

in these systems. When you think about it, it would've seemed

like a crazy idea, even a few years ago, that I would swap

my stuff with a total stranger whose real name I didn't know,

and without any money changing hands. Yet 99% of trades on Swaptree

happen successfully, and the 1% that receive a negative rating,

it's for relatively minor reasons, like the item didn't arrive

on time. So what's happening here? An extremely powerful dynamic,

that has huge commercial and cultural implications is at play.

Namely that technology is enabling trust between strangers.

We now live in a global village, where we can mimic the ties

that used to happen face to face, on a scale and in ways

that've never been possible before. So what's actually happening

is that social networks and real time technologies are taking

us back, we're bartering, trading, swapping, sharing,

but they're being re-invented into dynamic and appealing forms.

What I find fascinating is that we've actually wired our world

to share, whether that's our neighbourhood, our school,

our office, or our Facebook network. And that's creating

an economy of "what's mine is yours".

From the mighty E-Bay, the grandfather of exchange market places, to car sharing companies

such as Go-Get, where you pay a monthly fee

to rent cars by the hour, to social lending platforms such as Zoper,

that will take anyone in this audience with a hundred dollars

to lend, and match them with a borrower anywhere in the world.

We're sharing and collaborating again in ways that I believe

are more hip then hippy. I call this ground-swell "collaborative consumption".

Now, before I dig in to the different systems of collaborative

consumption, I'd like to try and answer the question

that every author rightfully gets asked, which is where

did this idea come from? Now, I'd like to say I woke

up one morning and said, "I'm going to write about

collaborative consumption", but actually it was

a complicated web of seemingly disconnected ideas.

Over the next minute, you're going to see, a bit like

a conceptual fireworks display of all the dots

that went on in my head.

The first thing I began to notice was, a few years ago,

how many big concepts were emerging, from the Wisdom

of Crowds to Smart Mobs and how ridiculously easy

it is to form groups for a purpose.

A link to this crowd mania, for examples all around the world,

from the election of a president to the infamous Wikipedia

and everything in between, on what the power of numbers could achieve.

Now, you know when you learn a new word, and then you start

to see that word every where? That's what happened to me,

when I noticed that we are moving from passive consumers

to creators, to highly enabled collaborators.

What's happening is the internet is removing the middle man,

so that anyone, from a t-shirt designer to a knitter,

can make a living selling peer to peer. And the ubiquitous

force of this peer to peer revolution means that sharing

is happening at phenomenal rates. I mean, it's amazing

to think that in every single minute of this speech,

25 hours of YouTube video will be loaded. Now, what I find

fascinating about these examples how they're actually tapping

in to our primate instincts. I mean, we're monkeys,

and we're born and bred to share and co-operate.

And we were doing so for thousands of years, whether

it's when we hunted in packs, or farmed in corp,

farmed in co-operatives, before this big system called

hyper-consumption came along, and we built these fences,

and created our own little fiefdoms. But things are changing,

and one of the reasons why are the digital natives,

or Gen Y. They're growing up sharing, files, video games,

knowledge, it's second nature to them.

So we, the millennials (I am just a millennial) are like foot soldiers,

moving us from a culture of me, to a culture of we.

Now, all of this was flying through my head, around the end of 2008,

when of course, sorry. Um, the reason why it's happening

so fast is because of mobile collaboration. Er, we now live

in a connected age where we can locate anyone,

anytime, in real time, from a small device in our hands.

All of this was going through my head towards the end of 2008

when, of course, the great financial crash happened.

Thomas Freedman is one of my favourite New York times columnists,

and he poignantly commented that 2008 was when we hit a wall.

When Mother Nature and the market both said, "no more".

Now, we rationally know that an economy built on hyper-consumption

is a ponzi scheme, it's a house of cards, yet it's hard

for us to individually know what to do. So all of this is a lot of twittering, right,

was a lot of noise and complexity in my head until actually

I realised it was happening because of all key drivers:

One, a renew- a renewed belief in the importance of community,

and a very re-definition of what friend and neighbour

really means; a torrent of peer to peer social networks

and real time technologies, fundamentally changing the way we,

we behave; three, pressing unresolved environmental concerns;

and four, a global recession that has fundamentally

shocked consumer behaviours. These four drivers are fusing

together and creating the big shift, away from the twentieth

century defined by hyper-consumption, towards the twenty-first

century defined by collaborative consumption.

I genuinely believe that we're at an inflection point,

where the sharing behaviours (through sites such as "Flickr"

and "Twitter") that are becoming second nature on-line,

and being applied offline to areas of our everyday lives.

From morning commutes, the way fashion is designed,

it's the way we grow food.

We are consuming and collaborating once again.

So, my co-author Roo Rogers and I have actually gathered

thousands of examples from all around the world

of collaborative consumption. And though they vary enormously

in scale, maturity and purpose, when we dived into them

we realised that they could actually be organised into three

clear systems. The first is redistribution markets.

Redistribution markets, just like swaptree, is when you take

a used or pre-owned i-item, and move it from where it's not

needed to somewhere, or someone, where it is.

They're increasingly thought of as "the fifth",

which is reduce, reuse, recycle, repair, and redistribute,

because they stretch the lifecycle of a product,

and thereby reduce waste.

The second is collaborative lifestyles. This is the sharing

in resources of things like money, skills, and time.

I bet in a couple of years, that phrases like "co-working"

and "couch-surfing" and "time-banks" are going to become

a part of everyday vernacular. One of my, er, favourite

examples of collaborative consumption, er, collaborative

lifestyles, is called land share. It's a scheme in the UK

that matches Mr Jones, with some spare space in his back garden,

with Mrs Smith, a would-be grower. Together they grow their

own food. It's one of those ideas that's so simple

yet brilliant, you wonder why it's never been done before.

Now, the third system is product service systems. This is where you pay for the benefit of a

product,

what it does for you, without needing to own the product outright.

This idea is particularly powerful for things that have high

idling capacity. And that can be anything from baby goods,

to fashions, to, how many of you have a power drill?

Own a power drill? Right, that power drill will be used

around 12 to 13 minutes in its entire lifetime. [laughter]

It's kind of ridiculous, right, because what you need

is the hole, not the drill. [laughter and applause]

So why don't you rent the drill? Or even better, rent out

your own drill to other people and make some money from it?

These three systems are coming together and allowing people

to share resources without sacrificing their lifestyles

or their cherished personal freedoms. I'm not asking

people to share nicely in the sandpit.

So, I just want to give you an example of how powerful

collaborative consumption can be to change behaviours:

The average car costs eight thousand dollars a year to run.

Yet that car sits idle for 23 hours a day.

So when you consider these just, these two facts, it starts

to make a little less sense that we have to own one outright.

So this is where car sharing companies such as Zipcar and Go Get

come in. In 2009, Zipcar took, sorry, two hundred and fifty

participants from across 13 cities, and they're all

self-confessed car addicts and car sharing rookies,

and got them to surrender their keys for a month.

Instead these people had to walk, bike, take the train,

or other forms of public transport. They could only use their

Zipcar membership when absolutely necessary.

The results of this challenge, after just one month, were staggering.

It's amazing that 413 pounds were lost,

just from the extra exercise. But my favourite statistic

is that one hundred, out of the two hundred and fifty participants,

did not want their keys back. In other words, the car addicts

had lost their urge to own.

Now, product service systems have been around for years,

just think of libraries and launderettes.

But I think we're entering a new age, because technology

makes sharing frictionless and fun.

There's a great quote that was written in the New York Times,

it said, um, "sharing is to ownership what the iPod

is to the a-track, what solar power is to the coal mine".

I believe also, our generation, our relationship to satisfying

what we want is far less tangible than any other previous