3FOOD

Third Industrial Revolution Consulting Group
While many or most of the sharing activities are sustainable, some lag behind in this regard.
This is perhaps the crux of concerns around prosumer and sharing economy activities: are they
as or more sustainable in all the ways we expect of the economic activities they are displacing,
as well as fulfilling all of the legal requirements also required of the replaced economic
activities (e.g., safety, insured, taxes).
Given the complexity, it is often difficult to sort out the very different kinds of economic
activities emerging in the collaborative/sharing/prosumer sphere. Industry trend analyst
Jeremiah Owyang has been categorizing and describing these rapidly expanding domains in
updated versions of what he calls the Collaborative Economy Honeycomb. Version 3 released
in 2016 is shown on the next page. The number of categories has nearly tripled since the
release of the first version four years ago.
An indicator of how different these categories are is the increasing number of words and
phrases being used to describe the diverse activities once captured under umbrella terms like
collaborative or Sharing Economy. Ride sharing services like Uber, for example, are more
accurately referred to as rental services, as are room-booking services offered by Airbnb and
similar “rental economy” businesses. 350 Likewise, the “gig economy” is now used to describe
the labor and wage arrangements for jobs in this “on-demand economy”. 351
Sharing Economy experts like Neal Gorenflo, co-founder of Shareable.net, provide a more blunt
contrast between local wealth creating and circulating cooperative models versus the Uberstyle
wealth-extracting business models.
“We have an epic choice before us between platform coops and Death Star platforms, and the
time to decide is now,” he argues, pointing to Uber’s mega bet on becoming a global monopoly.
As of 2016 Uber had amassed € 13 billion of VC investments, while soaring to a paper-based
valuation of € 61 billion. “Uber signifies a new era in tech entrepreneurship. Its leaders express
an explicit ideology of domination and limitless, global ambition. In fact, the global tech sector
may be one of the most powerful stateless actors on the world stage today.” 352
uncertain (grey) connections, but note that there are several other interconnected tipping elements in the
climate system of the Earth that are not considered here. Abbreviation: EEP, Eastern Equatorial Pacific.”
350 Blanchard, Oliver (2015) Stop calling it the “Sharing Economy.” That isn’t what it is, July 29, 2015,
http://olivierblanchard.net/stop-calling-it-the-sharing-economy-that-isnt-what-it-is/.
351 Roberts, Jeff John (2015) As "sharing economy" fades, these 2 phrases are likely to replace it, Fortune, July 29,
2015, http://fortune.com/2015/07/29/sharing-economy-chart/.
352 Gorenflo, Neal (2015) How Platform Coops Can Beat Death Stars Like Uber to Create a Real Sharing Economy,
Shareable.net, November 3, 2015, http://www.shareable.net/blog/how-platform-coops-can-beat-death-starslike-uber-to-create-a-real-sharing-economy.
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