Collective Intelligence

I’m doing a year-long research project for my MBA program, and I’m really interested in the rise of tech-enabled startups that create value around sharing. This meme is well documented by Neal Gorenflo (who calls it the Shareable economy), Rachel Botsman (who calls it Collaborative Consumption) and Lisa Gansky (who calls it The Mesh).

Many of these startups -Airbnb for example- build and broker trust between strangers, utilizing a variety of tools -from 5-star ratings to displaying your mutual friends on Facebook. Others go deeper with social currencies by actually setting up credit systems for users to exchange value.

There is also a wave of web-based, peer-to-peer investment and funding sites -like Kiva,  Kickstarter and 33needs- that make it easy for people to pool money in a self-organizing manner.

This week, I’m at the Social Capital Markets conference to try and find a specific research topic within this space. Rather than making an assumption about what topics might be most valuable to research, I’d like to open up the question to the people working directly in this space.

The purpose of this research is to uncover an actionable opportunity, and to follow up with another year-long project to develop a project or business to meet this newly identified need.  I’m open to working directly with an organization that has a clear goal for something they’d like researched.

I'm doing a year-long research project for my MBA program, and I'm really interested in the rise of tech-enabled startups that create value around sharing. This meme is well documented by Neal Gorenflo (who calls it the Shareable economy), Rachel Botsman (who calls it Collaborative Consumption) and Lisa Gansky (who calls it The Mesh). Many ...