The sharing economy, while having already disrupted major industries like transportation and accommodation, is a landscape filled with significant and emerging Sharing Economy Market Opportunities. The core principle of the sharing economy—using a digital platform to unlock the value of underutilized assets—can be applied to a nearly limitless range of new verticals. The future growth of the industry will be driven by expanding this model beyond cars and homes and into new and more specialized domains, as well as by leveraging new technologies to create more efficient and decentralized marketplaces. For entrepreneurs and investors, these new frontiers represent the chance to build the "next Uber" or the "next Airbnb" in a host of untapped markets. The opportunities lie in identifying any asset that sits idle for a significant amount of time and then building the technology platform to make it easily shareable.
One of the largest emerging opportunities is in the B2B (Business-to-Business) sharing economy. While the first wave of the sharing economy was focused on peer-to-peer consumer applications, the same principles can be applied to the business world. There is a massive opportunity to create platforms for the sharing of expensive, underutilized business assets. For example, a platform for sharing heavy construction equipment could allow a construction company that owns an expensive crane, which may only be used on a project for a few weeks, to rent it out to other nearby construction companies when it's idle. A similar model could be applied to specialized manufacturing equipment, medical devices in hospitals, or even warehouse space. This B2B sharing model would allow businesses to reduce their capital expenditures, generate new revenue from their existing assets, and gain access to specialized equipment on a more flexible, on-demand basis.
Another major area of opportunity is the expansion of the sharing model to a wider range of personal and consumer goods. While car-sharing is well-established, there is an opportunity to create peer-to-peer rental marketplaces for a host of other items that people own but do not use frequently. This could include a platform for renting high-end fashion and accessories, allowing people to access a "virtual closet" of designer items for a special event without the high cost of ownership. It could include a platform for renting recreational equipment, such as skis, surfboards, or camping gear. It could even include a platform for sharing everyday household items, like power tools or kitchen appliances. The key to unlocking these "long-tail" sharing markets is to create a platform with a seamless user experience, a strong trust and insurance model, and the necessary logistics to handle the pickup and return of the physical goods.
A third, more technologically advanced opportunity lies in the creation of more decentralized and community-owned sharing economy platforms using technologies like blockchain. One of the major criticisms of the current sharing economy giants is that they are centralized, for-profit corporations that extract a significant take-rate (commission) from every transaction and hold all the power over their providers and users. The opportunity is to use blockchain and smart contracts to create a new generation of sharing economy protocols that are owned and governed by their users. In a decentralized ride-sharing network, for example, the drivers and riders themselves could collectively own the platform, with the rules and transaction fees being managed by a transparent, community-governed protocol rather than a central corporation. While still in its very early stages, this vision of a more equitable and decentralized "Web3" sharing economy represents a profound long-term opportunity to disrupt the current incumbents.
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