Collaborative economy can be defined in a broad manner as a mode of consumption and production of goods where actors share under-utilized or easy to share goods and services (cf. amongst others: Belk, 2013; Botsman & Rogers, 2010). This broad approach includes various sub‐sets (such as sharing economy, collaborative consumption or disintermediation through digital platforms), which often have very different societal impacts and raise very different challenges for public policy and the regular economy. Theses collaborative dynamics fulfil a distinctive role in the existing economy and create a broad set of new opportunities, but also generate major concerns and tensions with other actors and stakeholders (De Grave, 2014; Killick, 2015).
The understanding of the phenomenon of the collaborative economy remains still limited and its impact uncertain. In particular, the concept of the collaborative economy covers a wide range of organizational and business models and each of these models leads to a very different impact on economic development, social inclusion and environmental sustainability.
A recent review of the design methods of collaborative platforms in Barcelona allows to illustrate the ambiguity in basic understanding of the collaborative economy, ranging from imitating the aggressive economic model of the Silicon Valley start-ups such as Uber or Aribnb to the open and collaborative platforms as envisioned and promoted by Trebor Scholz (Cicero et al., 2016). All can have the opportunity to build social capital and community, although the social enterprise platforms are more suitable due to their characteristics. They strive towards fair labour conditions, social protections and benefits, also for temporary workers, they work in a transparent way and they focus on participatory platform development. Platforms formally organised as cooperatives go one step further in their ownership model, with a focus on a collectively owned platform, which will boost community building even more.
To evaluate the impact of the collaborative economy on sustainable regional development in the Region of Brussels‐Capital, it is important to understand the difference between the various organizational and business models that are adopted. The aim of the research presented in this paper is to conduct a comparative and systematic assessment of advantages and disadvantages of these models in a given urban region. For that, a typology of the main organizational and business models within the collaborative economy is build. The progress in relation to the state of the art is to go beyond the distinction between for‐profit and social orientations and include also modes of governance (contractual relationships, modes of collective decision making), the various business models (mix of market resources, public resources and voluntary resources) and their legal and tax framework in the typology.
The key hypothesis of the research is that the choices made in terms of organizational and business models have a crucial influence on the way in which the initiatives can promote socially inclusive and sustainable economic growth. To test the productivity of this hypothesis in the Region of Brussels‐Capital, we conducted a comparative and systematic assessment of advantages and disadvantages of organizational and business models in three specific sectors: mobility, housing and food.
In the full paper, the results on mapping various types of entrepreneurship in the collaborative economy and their business models, are presented. Furthermore, an analysis is conducted of the impact of these various types on building of social capital and community involvement around sustainable urban development in various local city areas.
REFERENCES
Belk, R. (2013). You are what you can access: sharing and collaborative consumption online. Journal of Business Research, 67, 1595‐1600.
Botsman, R. & Rogers, R. (2010). What’s Mine is Yours. The Rise of Collaborative Consumption.
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Cicero, S., Agamennone, Ch., Battaglia, E., 2016. A review of Methodologies for the Design and Incubation of Collaborative Platforms.
De Grave, A. (2014). The Sharing Economy: Capitalism’s Last Stand? Development & Society: Natural Resources, Economics, Social Development.
Killick, R. (2015, October 7). 'Sharing economy' companies like Uber and Airbnb aren't really 'sharing'
anything. Insider Business Times UK. Retrieved from http://uk.businessinsider.com.
2. Social innovation and social entrepreneurship
