Preface to the Synthetic Overview of the Collaborative Economy Report

As mentioned yesterday, this month we will be serialising the report “Synthetic overview of the collaborative economy”, coproduced by Orange Labs and the P2P Foundation. Today we start by posting the preface to the report. (Of course if you can’t wait you can download the full report here)

Preface

“The theme of the following work is the horizontalisation of productive human relationships that has been enabled through communication networks and in particular the Internet. These productive publics can generate their own practices and institutions through bottom-up dynamics, or they can be mobilized by existing institutions. Hence the emergence of the collaborative economy, which comes with many names and with different expressions, such as commons-based peer production (Yochai Benkler), wikinomics (Don Tapscott), crowdsourcing (Jeff Howe), open innovation (Henry Chesbrough), collaborative consumption (Rachel Botsman), and quite a few others. Different authors have mapped the outlines of those particular expressions of the collaborative economy, but we believe that an overall synthesis was still lacking. While a full account would be a tremendous undertaking, we do believe that the following work captures the essence of developments in this field, which represent a deep transformation of economic practices.

Two main agents of transformation guide this work. One is the emergence of community dynamics as an essential ingredient of doing business. It is no longer a matter of autonomous and separated corporations marketing to essentially isolated consumers, it is now a matter of deeply inter-networked economic actors involved in vocal and productive communities. The second is that the combined effect of digital reproduction and the increasingly ‘socialized’ production of value, makes the individual and corporate privatization of ‘intellectual’ property if not untenable, then certainly more difficult , and in all likelihood, ultimately unproductive. Hence the combined development of community-oriented and ‘open’ business models, which rely on more ‘social’ forms of intellectual property.

In this work, we therefore look at community dynamics that are mobilized by traditional actors (open innovation, crowdsourcing), and new models where the community’s value creation is at its core (the free software, shared design and open hardware models). We then look at monetization in the absence of private IP. Linked to these developments are the emergence of distributed physical infrastructures, where the evolution of the networked computer is mirrored in the development of networked production and even financing. Indeed the mutualization of knowledge goes hand in hand with the mutualization of physical infrastructures, such as collaborative consumption and peer to peer marketplaces, used to mobilize idle resources and assets more effectively.

This work is of course indebted to those who have described, analyzed and mapped its various expressions separately, and we have used their work to form our own synthesis. Amongst the works we have used more particularly are We Think, by Charles Leadbeater, What’s Mine is Yours, by Rachel Botsman, and Getting Results from Crowds, from Ross Dawson. Others have written synthetic essays that were just as crucial in mapping out particular fields or particular aspects. We cannot mention them all separately here, but they are all referenced throughout the text.

This project was undertaken by Michel Bauwens as lead researcher, but was truly a team effort. The P2P Foundation team consisted of Nicolás Mendoza (Colombia) and Franco Iacomella (Argentina), with further assistance from James Burke (Netherlands) and Chris Pinchen (UK). We developed a Case Study appendix focused in France with help from Antonin Léonard and Edwin Mootoosamy. We also had a secret weapon, Valerie Peugeot of Orange, which played a tremendously active role in guiding, correcting and suggesting avenues for our research. She was truly an extra member of the team, operating as a peer, and not just as a client.

We thank Orange Research for ordering and funding this synthetic overview of the collaborative economy.

This report is comprehensive and very dense with information and analysis. At the same time this is a continuously evolving and very complex field of emergence, and as such, the study is just one step in comprehending an evolving social and technological transition. What we hope is that this is therefore also a good stepping stone for further research efforts.”

 

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