Lisa Gansky, published her book “The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing” and co-founded Mesh Ventures. One key point she made in her TED TALK was about Access Vs Ownership. This basic shift can be arguably credited with the growth of most developments that are driving enterprise and customer conveniences world over. AWS and a host of other cloud services ushered in the era of cheap experimentation and thus extreme low cost threshold for testing, validating and launching a business. Ditto for Airbnb or Uber or WeWork or Zipcar. Dropbox, eMail (started with Sabeer Bhatia and Hotmail), Netflix or Maker spaces.
Basically Ownership is out. Access is in.
Though the book and the talk dates back to 2011 it is very relevant and gives us ideas for applying the same lens or frame to many other areas of business.
It will be amiss if I did not point out the first such mass experimentation of access vs ownership was undertaken in India. Starved for phone connections it created STD/ISD booths which provided access to everyone literally overnight to make phone calls all over the country and the world. Perhaps the first successful experiment with the – Mesh idea!
