We ask children to share- why don't organisations?

I am a member of a student led city Bike Share scheme- ScratchBikes . The biggest positive for me about the scheme is that it shows that people's attitude to ownership is changing. You don't need to buy a bike any more- you can share one. 

As well as the health benefits- Bike Sharing has massive cost and environmental implications which are increased as people learn to share and change their ownership attitude.

In the UK 80% of the items that people own are used less than once a month. You may use a power drill  between six and thirteen minutes in it’s entire lifetime and yet half of households have their own power drill. There are power drills all across the nation just gathering dust and taking up space!

The unused potential of all of these drills is called the idling capacity. Ownership of a product you use just once or twice a year makes no rational sense.

How can we use this idling capacity of equipment, resources and items to redistribute it elsewhere?

“The sharing movement is gathering pace. Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping reinvented through network technologies on a scale and in ways never possible before. From enormous marketplaces such as eBay and Craigslist, to emerging sectors such as social lending (Zopa), peer-to-peer travel (Airbnb) and car sharing (Zipcar or peer-to-peer RelayRides), swap trading, time banks, tool exchanges, land share, clothing swaps, toy sharing, shared workspaces, cohousing, coworking, CouchSurfing, car sharing, crowd funding, bike sharing, ride sharing, food co-ops, walking school buses are all examples of collaborative consumption which is changing traditional consumerist business models.” Notes Rachel Botsman in WMIY

These models have big implications for waste, collaboration, purchasing, sustainability and efficiencies- which organisations can take advantage of. Using on line systems it is now easy to match supply and demand through nearly instantaneous mass synchronisation of wants and needs in a way which both sides gain. 

Moving surplus resources or unwanted goods is fuelling an expanding sector known as Redistribution Markets. Redistribution Markets are upsetting traditional business models by providing a convenient way to find new homes for unwanted resources. 

What is stopping your organisation sharing physical, social, mental resources?

It is so important to redistribute resources because the real environmental effects of making a product sit just below the surface in the primary and secondary manufacture. From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives produces waste, yet most of this is hidden from view. 

“For the average consumer product, 10% of the raw materials used to make a product are found in the final product. That means the chair you are sitting on actually generated a further 90% of waste during primary and secondary manufacture. More alarmingly, the amount of waste generated for a single laptop computer is close to 4000 times its weight. “ says Rachel Botsman

People and businesses are learning it is important to get maximum value out of surplus resources by buying stuff that has more longevity, repairing stuff which can still be used- and making sure we don’t throw away anything that can be used elsewhere by redistributing the resource to someone who can use it.

The challenge and pressure of finding a new owner for an unwanted resource is usually time or space. It takes ages to find someone in your company or community who wants your old desk, office furniture, lab equipment etc and space is an issue because most organisations don’t have any.

The effectiveness of the redistribution markets increases as more join, as there are more resources circulating and the system serves its community better. The co- operative principle is always the same- many hands make light work, and the greater the collective benefit to the community. 

In these times of improved efficiencies organisations must look across the road at their neighbours and look to share resources both physical mental and social.

Notes

I am Daniel O’Connor , an ex Local Authority Officer and I have just launched a organisational redistribution network called WARPit  - it is a Social Network for organisational collaboration and resource sharing. Check out the youtube clip to see how it works. 

WARPit allows users to find home for resources within their organisation first. If this is not possible resources can be advertised to local partners.