This opinion piece by Boyd Cohen explores how a new blockchain layer for mobility could allow shared mobility startups to quickly launch their services and have immediate access to a network effect. Cohen is the co-founder of IoMob, which combines open source and blockchain technology to decentralize mobility, and the dean of research at the EADA Business School in Barcelona.

Boyd Cohen: Shareable readers are well aware of the overlapping interests between the blossoming sharing economy and the need to support the urban commons and Sharing Cities.

Luckily for us urban dwellers, a growing array of sharing economy projects have emerged to help, at least in some cases, reduce our resource consumption, and shift to circular and shared access models. Perhaps no part of the urban landscape has been more embraced by sharing economy entrepreneurs than mobility. And with good reason. Our cities have become all too congested and contaminated by the 70 percent of vehicles commuting as the single occupied variety. Our cities’ physical infrastructures and investments have been spent on enabling personal vehicles to travel, park, and refuel (with fossil fuels for the most part), instead of allocating such precious resources to other and better uses.

The shared mobility space is huge. We have witnessed in recent years all kinds of business models for shared mobility such as bikesharing (municipal or P2P), carsharing, carpooling, parking space sharing, shared access to EV charging stations, and more. In fact, in Barcelona alone, according to Sharemrkt there are more than 50 such shared mobility operators in the city.

The question we ask ourselves at IoMob however, is how can this growing number of shared mobility startups compete with the entrenched larger and multinational mobility companies (Uber, Cabify) and even the more benign, larger peers like Zipcar or municipally run bike-sharing schemes? The current shared mobility marketplace requires that each startup build their own underlying tech for handling payments, user registration, reputation management and the like, while also spending their scarce resources to build their brand and user base. It is an uphill battle for sure.

Blockchain technology offers a powerful alternative to this scenario by engaging a range of mobility stakeholders and an open-source set of technologies for startups. Larger companies and public transit operators — any shared mobility service operator, really — once validated as complying with local laws, could be made visible to any user who uses apps that are connected to the protocol. Instead of requiring each mobility provider to launch their own apps, the Internet of Mobility (IoM) allows for an open ecosystem of operators to share access to infrastructure and user bases. You may ask, for example, why would a larger operator be willing to share their users with a shared mobility startup? For a couple of reasons:

1. It supports customer retention by ensuring customer needs are met.

2. A previously established agreement between the providers — or one approved instantaneously — allows the provider offering access to their user to get some revenue based on previously agreed relationships with mobility providers. This would establish how much commission is transferred for each shared customer.

We don’t believe all mobility providers will embrace an open, transparent ecosystem, at least not in the beginning. But you can imagine over time the network effect for having a range of public and private mobility services sharing users in a city.

One step towards this has already begun, and is referred to as Mobility as a Service (MaaS). MaaS models are great in that they aggregate a set of public and private mobility services in a package for residents who can pay a monthly fee for a set amount or unlimited amount of services in a given month. We embrace MaaS models, which can easily be connected to an IoM protocol, as a great improvement over existing models. Yet, blockchain and IoM allows for an even better model. Embracing open protocols and open source software, shared mobility startups and established mobility providers can share access to users and the base tech in a way that is not exclusive. MaaS models tend to be run by private companies using proprietary software and partnering with the largest mobility services in the city. This leaves little room for mobility innovation or for the startups to gain access to the local mobility market.

We have even begun envisioning how you could blend MaaS and our open IoM thinking in the following way: Any validated mobility operator could work with an open hub aggregator to develop a monthly pricing package based on each user’s personal travel patterns. In this model, a new user could go to a website, either describe their travel patterns or have the system track them for a period of time, and then discover any mobility service, large or small. A drop-down menu would give users the option to pick and choose any service and see how much it would cost to add that service to a monthly package. Think of it as a Personalized Mobility as a Service (PMaaS).

Blockchain technology poses the potential to decentralize and democratize our economies. The Internet of Mobility could significantly enhance urban mobility users’ experience, while creating a vehicle for shared mobility startups to launch innovative services more rapidly and gain democratized access to urban mobility users.

Graphic courtesy of Boyd Cohen

Photo by mripp

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Labor productivity has never been greater but the rewards from this are not being evenly distributed. In fact, artificial intelligence, robotics, and smart devices are wreaking havoc on labor markets and generating growing calls for basic income to help avert even worse income inequality in the coming years. Aside from rampant inequalities, we seem to be stuck in making real progress on climate change and losses of biodiversity. In short, many of us have begun to question whether market-based capitalism as we know it is capable of improving conditions for planet and people.

Throughout the past several years I have been conducting research on a range of sustainable entrepreneurial initiatives around the globe, interviewing hundreds of inspiring entrepreneurs along the way. What I have come to realize is that there is a new wave of entrepreneurial organizing around the world, oriented toward making things better for the 99 percent. Yet much of this organizing does not fit the mold of traditional, capitalist approaches to startups, venture finance, growth and exit.

In my latest book, I refer to this phenomenon as post-capitalist entrepreneurship. For me it is something more than just entrepreneurship that also seeks to balance social and/or ecological impacts. Post-capitalist entrepreneurship (PCE) instead is about changing the underlying logic of entrepreneurial organizing, governance models, legal structures, approach to intellectual property, perception of consumption and production and of course the ultimate objectives and metrics of success.

In my view there is somewhat of a continuum of PCE from those closest to our current understanding of market-based entrepreneurship to more extreme versions of PCE:

For-benefit (B Corps)

On the surface, B Corps may seem like mere representations of responsible market-based entrepreneurship. After all, the majority of B Corps are for-profit enterprises, frequently with board of directors, closed, intellectual property models, private ownership and often receive traditional investment from angels and venture capitalists. Some B Corps are even publicly traded on traditional stock exchanges (e.g. Etsy, Natura). What makes B Corps the starting point for PCE is that they are legally bound to embrace social and ecological concerns. If “there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits” as the famed economist, Milton Friedman wrote in Capitalism and Freedom, then companies who legally bound themselves to something beyond profits, as B Corps do, are something different than what we think market-based enterprises are about.

Platform Cooperatives

The media has offered plenty of coverage of the platform capitalist business models like Uber, Airbnb and Task Rabbit. Yet, what has been underexplored so far is the emergence of alternative models of sharing economy platforms which embrace ideas like the commons and cooperative governance. The platform cooperative movement is picking up steam with support from the Platform Cooperative Consortium, as well as a growing number of innovators embracing the Occupy Movement´s values, but leveraging technology to turn their activism into collective entrepreneurial action.

Peer Production and Consumption

While most of the sharing economy, including platform cooperatives, are primarily oriented towards recirculated goods and skills in society more efficiently, there is something potentially even more impactful happening mostly in cities around the globe. The maker movement is picking up steam around the globe, supported by the 1100 Fab Labs, platforms like Etsy which connect makers with distributed customers seeking unique, instead of mass-produced products made in China, and numerous other democratized technologies making innovation more affordable for the 99 percent.

Loic Le Goueff, a 27-year-old Swiss national agrarian, and his partner launched a startup called Aquapioneers. Through access to Barcelona’s Green Fab Lab, the pair had managed to design and build a closed loop aquaponics device which can be used by homeowners and renters to produce their own vegetables at their homes with minimum investment and low operating costs. What makes Aquapioneers so interesting is that they have committed to the maker community and to open source hardware. In fact, they are making their design freely available for downloading and printing at the more than 1,100 Fab Labs around the world.

The Fab City initiative encourages member cities to commit to producing at least 50 percent of everything consumed in the city by 2054. More than a dozen cities around the world including Amsterdam, Barcelona, Boston, Detroit and Santiago, Chile, have already made the ambitious commitment. To achieve these goals cities such as Barcelona have been supporting a grassroots maker movement of producers and consumers for everything from energy and housing to furniture and food. Sometimes cash changes hands while in others, alternative currencies, even local, social, cryptocurrencies are being used to encourage value exchange.

Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAOs)

Still mostly a dream, the idea behind DAOs is that you could have platforms connecting users for exchange without an intermediary monetizing the transactions. Think Uber without Uber in the middle, Airbnb without Airbnb. DAOs would be blockchain-enabled platforms facilitating exchange through smart contracts and distributed ledgers but no ownership of the platform. Essentially DAOs are like open source software supported by developers around the globe designed to take out the platform capitalist intermediaries and their venture capitalists. One of the most advanced experiments in the DAO space is OpenBazaar which essentially aims to be like eBay without eBay.

Conclusion

I am not so naïve as to suggest that capitalism is dead or perhaps that it could die anytime soon. Instead, what I am saying, is that capitalism, and the short-termism that frequently emerges, does not appear to be capable of addressing the world´s most pressing problems. But rather than just protest in the street like the Occupy Movement did, we are starting to witness a new, collective movement of entrepreneurs and citizens aiming to take matters into their own hands by creating new organizational models (or remaking old ones like the platform cooperativism movement) to challenge the status quo and to create a new kind of economy, one that it is frequently more local but at the same time interconnected globally. Can the post-capitalist entrepreneurship movement operate in parallel with, and successfully compete against venture capital-backed and publicly-traded traditional enterprises? Will the PCE movement help us create a more circular, sustainable and just economy in time to avert even worse crises of inequality and climate change? I do not have clear answers to these questions, but I prefer to be optimistic about their chances. How about you?

Originally published in Triple Pundit.

Photo by kvanhorn

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