<p>Robin Chase is a transportation entrepreneur. She is co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar, the largest carsharing company in the world; as well as co-founder of Veniam, a network company that moves terabytes of data between vehicles and the cloud. </p><p>Her recent book is <i>Peers Inc: How People and Platforms are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism</i>. Her current passion is working with cities to maximize the transformation possible with the introduction of self-driving cars.</p><p>She sits on the Boards of the World Resources Institute and Tucows, and serves on the Dutch multinational DSM’s Sustainability Advisory Board. In the past, she served on the boards of Veniam and the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, the French National Digital Agency, the National Advisory Council for Innovation & Entrepreneurship for the US Department of Commerce, the Intelligent Transportations Systems Program Advisory Committee for the US Department of Transportation, the OECD’s International Transport Forum Advisory Board, the Massachusetts Governor’s Transportation Transition Working Group, and Boston Mayor’s Wireless Task Force.</p><p>Robin lectures widely, has been frequently featured in the major media, and has received many awards in the areas of innovation, design, and environment, including the prestigious Urban Land Institute’s Nicols Prize as Urban Visionary, <i>Time</i> 100 Most Influential People, <i>Fast Company</i> Fast 50 Innovators, and <i>BusinessWeek</i> Top 10 Designers. </p>
Leading Pioneer of the Sharing Economy & Founder and Former CEO of Zipcar
<ul><li><strong>Sharing: A Simple Approach for Maximizing ROI</strong></li><li>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, digital, temporal, synergistic, collaborative) Robin Chase explains how to turn perceptions of scarcity (and cost centers) into a reality of abundance (and profit, innovation centers).</li><li><strong>Beyond Web 2.0: Collaborative Consumption, Financing & Infrastructure</strong></li><li>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. Robin Chase explains what it means to create platforms that enable participation.</li><li><strong>More Meadows</strong></li><li>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. Robin Chase believes that 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.</li></ul>