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Rachel Botsman forewarned the London Business Forum that her accent was a hybrid of “British, American, Australian and a little bit of Irish.” Her accent stretches from one side of the globe to the other just as the new collaborative technologies that were the subject of her talk to the London Business Forum (LBF) do.

Collaborative innovation, Botsman revealed, is shaking up traditional business models and “opening up entirely new market places that are high in value and values.” We are currently experiencing a “social economic revolution” and Botsman wanted to explore three mega trends that she believes will “rock the next decade,” transforming “not just what we consume but how we consume.”

Botsman began by asking her audience to close their eyes and think of an item that was valuable to them. She apologised to those who had chosen their wedding rings before asking people to open their eyes, take off that item and wave it around. Pushing levels of trust, Botsman then told those gathered at this LBF event to hand their item to the person to their left.

This simple request provoked laughter but not of the comfortable kind, in fact quite the opposite, these were nervous laughs. “It’s a tough thing to do, isn’t it?” said Botsman. The point she was making is that in person we often find it hard to exchange something, or even start a conversation with a complete stranger. However, through technology strangers are often quicker to connect; technology offers a space where it is easier to build trust with people you have never met.

The “Godfather of this space,” she explained, is eBay. EBay’s founder, Pierre Omidyar, tested the idea when he put a broken lazar pointer up for sale on his personal website. To his surprise, the winning bidder paid $14.83 and when Omidyar felt he had to emphasise that it was broken the bidder responded: “I’m a collector of broken lazar pointers.” And so eBay was born because Omidyar’s experiment proved that the internet was a place where millions of haves could be matched with millions of wants without the middle man. “Pierre,” Botsman reflected, “saw the future.”

We have wired our world to share and connect and this has happened, Botsman suggested, in four phases:

1. Technology to share information e.g. wikipedia
2. Technology to connect and reconnect e.g. MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn
3. Technology to share files, thoughts etc.
4. Technology to share everything – money, cars, time, skills, even back gardens

It is the fourth phase on which Botsman has focused her recent study and it is a phase she calls “collaborative consumption.” This new type of consumerism is reinventing the marketplace in the Facebook age.

To illustrate this fourth phase Botsman cited several examples. Her first was Zopa, an online marketplace that connects people who want to lend and borrow money thus sidestepping the banks for better rates. A study in Marketing Week revealed that only 18% of people trusted the big banks and Zopa’s success, Botsman argued, has shown that people feel more accountable to their peers than a big bank and lenders are more trusting. By 2013 Zopa is predicted to take up 10% of the personal loans market and peer-to-peer lending is expected to become a $5 billion industry.

Another example is airbnb where members of the community can rent out and rent others’ properties. Botsman explained that the founders had initially thought people would just rent out rooms but discovered that it is the community who ultimately define the marketplace, with igloos, aircraft hangers and even a small island in Fiji listed on the website. They also recognised that it was important to think of the individuals in this community as “members” rather than as “customers” to emphasise the two-way relationship that the company has with the members of its community.

Botsman argued that driving this trend is the desire we all have to be part of a community. Sites such as meetup.com offer a space where groups of people with shared interests can connect in order to meet offline. A brand that Botsman showed were capitalising on this trend is Nike with their online community, Nike Plus. With over 2 million members who spend 40% more on Nike products, Nike Plus connects Nike wearing runners who together have run 13,547 laps around the world since the community’s creation.

Why Nike is so clever, Botsman told the LBF, is because they are tapping into “the social self.” Quoting Nike’s President, Charlie Denson, Botsman said, “Consumers want to be part of a community, […] they want to be part of something.” Nike’s community is enabling its members to create meaningful relationships. It isn’t just about the product but about how that product connects an individual to others who also own, or enjoy, that product.

We are all now familiar with social networking but this has seeded the way for another kind of exchange, service networking. Botsman revealed she is a big fan of a start-up called TaskRabbit, which is a sort of eBay for all those errands, tasks and jobs that you would rather someone else do – picking up the groceries, walking the dog, weeding the garden. Users post their task online and then “task runners” bid to complete the task. The average task, said Botsman, is answered in less than 10 minutes and the runners – typically students, empty nesters, stay-at-home parents – are earning around “$5,000 a month!”

Others employing this service model are ITunes, Streetcar, Netflix and LOVEFiLM, and the London cycle hire scheme. “What do they have in common?” Botsman asked, the products are “there when you want them, gone when you don’t.” Users are paying to access a product rather than own it. “Our relationship to stuff is undergoing a profound transformation,” argued Botsman; it is no longer the object that people want but the service that it provides.

Consumers are realising that so many products have what Botsman called, “idling capacity.” The perfect example of this, she suggested, is the power drill. Nearly half of all households own a power drill but on average these drills are only used for 12-13 minutes in their entire lifetime. Why then, Botsman questioned, don’t B&Q move to a service model? Another advantage of this model is that these companies benefit from the “collective wisdom” of their members, with whose help the companies can build a database of consumer information that is invaluable.

Botsman truly believes that we are at the start of a revolution that could be, she argues, “as big as the industrial revolution” in the way that it alters consumer behaviour. Moving away from an “age of individuality”, she anticipates that the next 20 years will be defined by an “age of community.” Our desire to be part of a community is nothing new; these new technologies are tapping into core human behaviours argued Botsman reiterating Clay Shirky’s suggestion that we are “monkeys with internet access.”

Whilst for the previous generation it was about “keeping up with the Joneses,” our generation will be defined by “connecting and getting to know the Joneses,” Botsman informed the LBF. We are seeing the emergence of a new social currency, one where it is not possessions but “reputation, community and shared access” that matter.

In conclusion, Botsman turned to what this means for business. She predicted that this era of “collaborative consumption” will reinvent business. “Businesses will survive and prosper,” she offered, “but not necessarily in their current forms. The ones that I think will get ahead are those that start to put experiences and people in front of products. Those brands that recognise not just ‘What does this mean for me?’ but ‘What does this mean for us?’”