Sharing’s Not Just for Start-Ups

This excerpt is reposted from Harvard Business Review.

Written by Rachel Botsman

Two years ago Peggy Fang Roe noticed a frustrating phenomenon. The chief sales and marketing officer in Marriott’s Asia Pacific division, Fang Roe knows that hotel conference rooms are underutilized—yet she often saw people searching Marriott’s lobbies and restaurants for a quiet spot to work. “I thought it was crazy that our guests couldn’t get easy access to our vacant spaces,” she says. So at her initiative, in 2012 Marriott partnered with LiquidSpace, an online platform that lets people quickly book flexible workspaces by the hour or day, testing the idea in 40 hotels in Washington, DC, and San Francisco. “It wasn’t just hotel guests reserving spaces, but also locals—from lawyers to independent workers to consultants,” Fang Roe says. Currently 432 Marriott hotels have meeting spaces listed with LiquidSpace—and because many of the people reserving space aren’t guests, the arrangement helps Marriott reach new consumers. “The Workspace on Demand program is proof that Marriott is…willing to disrupt what hotels are about,” says Glen Harvell, who now leads the program.

Marriott is just one example of an established company that’s starting to take a serious interest in the collaborative economy. Many observers associate the sector only with start-ups such as Airbnb (which lets people rent out unused rooms, apartments, or homes) and Uber (an on-demand car service). In fact the concept is being adopted by large companies and applied to intangible assets, not just cars and rooms. I define the collaborative economy as a system that activates the untapped value of all kinds of assets through models and marketplaces that enable greater efficiency and access. Increasingly, those assets include such things as skills, utilities, and time. The space includes peer-to-peer money services such as Lending Club (recently valued at $3.8 billion), massive open online course (MOOC) providers such as Coursera, and idiosyncratic concepts such as BorrowMyDoggy (through which pet owners make their pooches available for walks or playdates).

Rachel Botsman gives big brands a practical guide on how to participate in the collaborative economy using the above innovation principles. Read the full article, Sharing’s Not Just for Start-ups on Harvard Business Review.