Babson Entrepreneurship Forum 2013 – Robin Chase
Robin Chase is the founder and CEO of Buzzcar, a service that enables car owners and car drivers to share and rent cars. She was also the co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar, the innovative car sharing reservation service. Babson was fortunate to have her speak at the closing remarks of the annual Babson Entrepreneurship Forum.
Chase emphasized the significance of the sharing economy and how individuals and businesses can utilize society’s excess capacity to make use of the available abundant resources. Platforms have the amazing ability to scale and the individuals and combine the resources with the corporations to create peers incorporated business model. According to Chase, the industrial strengths of companies, institutions, and government include large investments, multi-year efforts, integration and aggregation of many parts, deep sector knowledge, diverse technical expertise(s), standard contracts and standardization, consistency, brand promise (trusted company), and being global. The strengths of individuals like people, small NGOs and companies include small investments, short-term sporadic efforts, delivery of small services, local knowledge, specific unique expertise/offering, customization, specialization, creativity, personal social networks (trusted individual), and being local. When implementing the “Peers Incorporated” business model, corporations and individuals can solve exponential problems together and best utilize the available resources.
The future is full of abundance and entrepreneurs, including yourself, can incorporate Chase’s “Peers Incorporated” concept. This concept enables individuals and corporations to both benefit because the corporations have the economies of scale while the individuals have the local touch and the needs for the products/services. Both individuals and corporations can be the producers and the consumers in the market, helping society to make the best out of its excess capacity and create more abundance in the world.