Topic 6 Full overview of the concept

Main characteristics

  • New market behaviours: renting, lending, swapping, sharing, bartering
  • Optimising underused assets
  • Digital platform as marketplace: while CC exists beyond data and digital platforms, the latter brings CC to a much larger scale by facilitating the connection and coordination of fragmented sides of the market through the technology

Main drivers

  • Technological innovation: ICT and internet development
  • Value shift of consumers: from ownership to access
  • Economic benefits: cost saving and financial rewards
  • Practical benefits: convenience and flexibility
  • Environmental benefits: tackling consumerism and waste
  • Social benefits: community building, social cohesion, access to unaffordable assets

Actors

  • Provider: individual or professional
  • Consumer
  • Digital platform: run by a company (private most of the time)

Practices

  • Product-service system
  • Collaborative lifestyle
  • Redistribution markets

Limits and critics

  • Boomerang effect: higher demand
  • Foster wealth inequalities
  • Precarisation of work
  • Unfair competition: low regulation

The following video offers an animated overview of the concept: