Robin Chase
- Entrepreneur, Innovator and Pioneer
- Founder and Former CEO of Zipcar, Buzzcar and GoLoco
- TIME magazine's 100 Most Influential People
Travels From
Massachusetts
Robin Chase Speaker Biography
Robin Chase is an entrepreneur, innovator and pioneer in the carsharing community.
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.
Since their inception, Zipcar, GoLoco and Buzzcar have been seen as disruptive and innovative: they used technology and marketing to change the way people own and use cars; they changed the ways cities are lived in and built; they changed prejudices about the incompatibility of environmentalism and capitalism. Innovator Robin Chase helps individuals, companies and government understand where to look for innovation and how to enable it. She explores how rethinking “excess capacity” can be combined with technology and platforms for participation to unlock innovation, new profit centers and ultimately lead us to a sustainable planet. In 2009, Robin was honored by TIME magazine as one of the year's 100 Most Influential People. Craig Newmark wrote: "Robin's work illustrates what's best about people using the Internet: not well-intentioned yet futile do-goodism but business that's also a community service. It's about people using the Internet to work together in the service of one another." She has been frequently featured in the major media including TODAY, The New York Times, National Public Radio, Newsweek and TIME magazines, as well as several books on entrepreneurship.
Robin Chase is on the Board of the World Resources Institute, the US Secretary of Commerce's National Advisory Committee for Innovation & Entrepreneurship, and the US Department of Transportation's Intelligent Transportation Systems Program Advisory Committee. She served on the World Economic Forum Future of Transportation Council, the Massachusetts Governor’s Transportation transition team, and the Boston Mayor’s Wireless Task Force. In 2009, she was included in the Time 100 Most Influential People.
To book Innovation Speaker Robin Chase call 901-754-9404.
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.
