plenary ‘What’s Going to Change Is the Way Meetings Are Used’ WHAT’S YOUR STORY? Rachel Botsman
The co-author of What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption is the Convene- sponsored opening keynote speaker at this month’s DMAI Annual Convention — where she’ll talk about how ‘distributed power’ is changing the meeting and travel sectors.
If you look across sectors there is a democratization happening around everything. Where if you think of the industrial age, it really sort of central- ized power, it centralized wealth, it centralized production, it centralized jobs — we’re now living in an age that I call distributed power, where power is moving to the edges, to networks, to individuals. And that’s changing the way people think about currency. It’s chang- ing the way they think about jobs.
Looking back [to the genesis of What’s Mine Is Yours], it feels so clear. I’m not sure the threads were so clear at the time, but it really was a convergence of a few things. The first was, I was kind of obsessed with how technology was changing the way we could collaborate and share. It was taking out the fric- tion to share, and it was creating some kind of trusts. My hunch was that these behaviors were going to start to extend into other areas of our lives, whether that was travel, whether that was [physical] stuff. That was the first very big insight.
The second was more around my per- sonal behaviors, where I realized I’d given up owning a car and now I access one on Zipcar. And I’d stopped buying videos and music, and I was accessing them on Spotify and Netflix. And I was using eBay and I was using Craigslist. And I thought, how are these ideas con- nected? There’s something in common with these things.
And then the third [insight] was just, this was before the crash, but there was a widespread questioning of the economy and the consumer system and was it
22 PCMA CONVENE JULY 2013
sustainable, stemming from an environmental and an economic point of view, that we’d created a whole world dependent on consumption. So much conversation of, is this making us happy? Is this a good business model? I just had this feeling that this shift was under way.
I will look at collaborative consumption [during her DMAI keynote], not just through travel but really through a higher lens of experiences. I will actually start outside the travel sec- tor and pull insights of what we can learn from the differ- ent kinds of disruption. Then I will pull out into some bigger macro trends that are under way that we should all be aware of.
By travel, I don’t just mean accommoda- tion. I mean the whole ecosystem of transportation, of food, of the experi- ence people are having, and really trying to show how there’s a little bit of a misperception out there that [col- laborative consumption] is a threat, and show how in most instances, it actually grows the market. It’s a different kind of engagement, attracts a different kind of visitor, and gives them a very different relationship to the place that they are visiting.
You’re probably aware of examples like LiquidSpace. It’s a recent investment by Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, where they basically have the insight
that when you travel, it’s often really hard to find a meeting space, and why isn’t it as easy to book a meeting space as it is to book a hotel room. They then realized that if you look at office utiliza- tion and space utilization, it’s extremely low — it’s around 30 percent. They’ve done something really smart in that they’ve done big partnerships with peo- ple like Accenture and Marriott Hotels and taken all those spaces that would otherwise be sitting idle and actually made them liquid. When you’re travel- ing on the road, you can book these meeting spaces in under five minutes.
In terms of conferences and big events, I don’t think they’re going to go away. I think they’re going to grow in impor- tance, as workforces become more
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