Travels from New York, USA
Robin Chase's speaking fee falls within range: $25,000 to $30,000
“Everyday, create the world you want to live in.” That has been visionary Robin Chase’s approach to addressing the greatest dilemmas of the 21st century. An authority on transportation with a background in business, Robin Chase founded the car-share business Zipcar with only $68 in her bank account.
Regarded as one of the most influential people of our era by Time magazine, she has been credited with reinventing capitalism and aiding in the promotion of a new economic paradigm where people come together on the Internet to service each other and resolve problems on a community level. Her bestselling book, Peer Inc., takes an in-depth look at this model.
Chase has continued to explore new ways of doing things through the foundation of her French-based company, Buzzcar and her participation on various boards, including the OECD’s International Transport Forum Advisory Board.
Due to her ingenuity, passion, and successful ventures in the formation of platform-based companies, Chase is a highly sought-out speaker by groups that prioritize making change over making money.
Robin Chase is founder and CEO of Buzzcar, a service that brings together car owners and drivers in a carsharing marketplace. Buzzcar.com empowers individuals to take control of their mobility, without looking to governments or big businesses for solutions. Robin is also founder and former CEO of Zipcar, the largest carsharing company in the world, and GoLoco, an online ridesharing community.
She is on the Board of the World Resources Institute, the National Advisory Council for Innovation and Entrepreneurship for the US Department of Commerce, and the OECD’s International Transport Forum Advisory Board. She also served on the Intelligent Transportations Systems Program Advisory Committee for the US Department of Transportation, the Massachusetts Governor’s Transportation Transition Working Group and Boston Mayor’s Wireless Task Force.
Chase lectures widely, has been frequently featured in the major media, and has received many awards in the areas of innovation, design and environment, including TIME 100 Most Influential People, Fast Company Fast 50 Innovators and BusinessWeek Top 10 Designers.
Chase graduated from Wellesley College and MIT′s Sloan School of Management, and was a Harvard University Loeb Fellow.
Robin Chase distinguishes the system she calls "Peers Inc.", from events like bake sales and craft fairs. In a Peers Inc. way of thinking, corporations and individuals form symbiotic relationships that play to the strengths of both: the corporations bring economies of scale, significant resource investment, and expertise in many realms while individuals (peers) bring diversity, localization, and customization.
“What’s truly happening is that we’ve got the power of a free and open Internet and on top of that we’re putting a platform for participation,” Chase points out. “The peers are now in partnership with the company creating shared value on shared values and each strengthening the other in what the other can’t do...So we have the peers that are providing the services and the product and the company doing the stuff that company’s do. The two of these are delivering the best of both worlds.”
Robin Chase looks at whole systems, finds the excess capacity and assets, and invents ways to utilize them. Her programs on entrepreneurship and innovation are a rare find in that they blend business with community service and production with building community. Chase is one of the finest authorities on the new collaborative economic model forged by Zipcar and Buzzcar. She shares her pioneering experiences in combining industry with Internet-based peer platforms so that more entrepreneurs will be able to restructure existing paradigms and convert scarcity into abundance.
Sharing: A Simple Approach for Maximizing ROI Zipcar succeeds because it created a platform for the sharing of excess capacity (idle car hours), which reduced costs for everyone who uses the asset. By taking a closer look at the anatomy of sharing (personal, institutional, web 2.0) and dimensions of the assets (physical, digitial, temporal, synergistic, collaborative) we can turn perceptions of scarcity (and cost centers) into a reality of abundance (and profit, innovation centers).
Beyond Web 2.0 (Collaborative Production): Collaborative Consumption, Financing & Infrastructure The online web 2.0 phenomenon of collaborative production is much loved because of its speed and scalability. Zipcar is an example of collaborative consumption, financing, and infrastructure (a distributed nationwide fleet in existence because of the aggregated demands of its members). Reconceptualizing what it means to collaborate offers an intriguing new way to think about infrastructure investment. What does it mean to create platforms to enable participation?
More Meadows The strength and resilience of meadows are derived from their diversity, ability to evolve, and collaboration within the system. In highly dynamic environments characterized by uncertainty about the future, we need to reduce risk and increase the likelihood of survival. The key is to ensure that institutions (and governments) have laid the foundations that foster experimentation, permit learning, and ultimately evolution of successful new businesses that take advantage of unexploited openings (where there is excess capacity) in the ecosystem. In economics, we call these randomized field experiments. Creating more meadows is an important risk reduction and innovation strategy.
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