Recent Eventssee all
Where the Long Symbiotic Relationship of Tech & Media Might End Up
Kara Swisher has watched the rise of tech and the fall of media since the beginning of the trouble with the arrival of the Internet in the mid-1990s. She knows better than almost anyone how entangled the two industries are from her long prominent perch as a well-known tech journalist. Kara can lay out that story and make the definitive analysis of what’s going on today and potentially in the future like almost no other. Her storied career covering the tech business began with the Wall Street Journal. She regularly interviewed the top tech titans and media moguls at her “D: All Things Digital” conference. She’s gone on to co-found Recode that was acquired by Vox. And she’s now got one of the rare slots as an opinion columnist for the New York Times. Watch what she has to say now.
The Future of Food, Alternative Meats, and Many Materials
If you take the really big picture view, and look ahead over the coming decades, the biggest technological development of our time could well be synthetic biology, our ability to now engineer biological systems. To catch up, you can start by sinking your teeth into an Impossible Burger. Alternative meats, whether plant-based like the Impossible Burger or cell-based and grown in vats, make up one of the first waves of products that has moved off the speculative drawing boards and into the actual public marketplace to give people some taste of what’s to come. This future of food, which is a harbinger to the future of bio-materials and an entire bio-economy, is the subject of this What’s Now: San Francisco event with Liz Specht, Director of Science and Technology at the Good Food Institute.
Today’s Tech Unicorns May Be the New Dotcoms Heading for a Crash
Will the year 2020 be another 2000 for tech investors who seem to have forgotten the lessons of the great Dotcom crash from just 20 years ago? Scott Galloway feels that the way investors are treating tech unicorns gearing up for IPOs today seems eerily similar to how they treated dotcom companies in 1999 in the run-up to that disaster.
A Path to Humane Technology – with Tristan Harris
Tristan Harris believes that many technology companies have gone too far. They are tapping into base desires and fears hardwired into our primitive animal brains to keep people hooked on social media. The result is what he calls “human downgrading” which is leading to a wide range of social ills, from depression to political polarization. Harris is a world expert on how technology steers us all, the former Design Ethicist at Google who left to co-found the Center for Humane Technology, and he was our featured guest at What’s Now: San Francisco in November.
The Real Timetable for Robust AI that We can All Trust
The media world is filled with breathless accounts of how artificial intelligence soon will transform almost all fields, take away countless human jobs, and keep improving until, by some accounts, AI ends up running the planet as our overlords. Gary Marcus is here to reset the conversation with a more realistic assessment of the actual capability of AI today, in the next few years, and in the decades to come too. He’s the co-author of the brand new book Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust, and our featured guest at the September What’s Now: San Francisco.
The Many Ways We Will Soon Be Talking to Robots
What if in the near future the must-have gift for a one-year-old was a robot Teddy Bear that could be playmate, teacher, security guard - all in one? Would it be lauded as the wonder tool of early childhood development and childcare? Or would it be feared as way too creepy? And who would program what the robot said every day in every situation to that young mind - parents or some engineer? These are the kinds of questions that David Ewing Duncan explores in his new book Talking to Robots, Tales from Our Human-Robot Futures, and that he will lay out in conversation as our featured guest at our next What’s Next: New York.
The Co-Founder of 23andMe on the Next Phase of Consumer Genetic Testing
Few people have as much perspective on what average people can know about their genetic makeup both now and in the near future than Linda Avey, the co-founder of the pioneering biotech company 23andMe. That company offered the world’s first personal genetics service and its method of using saliva and working directly with consumers earned the award of Time Magazine's Invention of the Year in 2008. It also set off a wave of competition and growth in the field throughout the developing world. Ten years later Avey has co-founded a new company that is positioned for the next phase of expanding easy access to genetic testing in the developing world, particularly in India. And this month Avey will share her thoughts on the state of genetic testing in developed and developing world alike as our next featured guest at What's Now: San Francisco.
How the World of Hardware Will Soon Transform Like Software
Hardware is the new software - or will be soon. Working in the world of software today is relatively easy and fluid compared to a decade or two ago. Many basic software components are modular, are freely shared through open source, and can make use of standardized interfaces and APIs that allow easy interoperability. That is not the case in the world of hardware today. Tools in the manufacturing process do not link together like software. Companies actually work to prevent others from quickly and easily building off their hardware tools and products. Yet that may soon change. That’s the message of Nick Pinkston, the young founder of two successful startups that applied advanced software to accelerate the manufacturing of hardware, and who will be our featured guest of the next What’s Now: New York event.
Our Best Shot at Creating a Future of Shared, Electric, Autonomous Transport
Tim Papandreou wants to give everyone a healthy wake-up call that society is on the verge of a once-in-a-lifetime transition to a transportation system that is shared, electric and automated. And all three of these major shifts in 21st century transport are already happening and will be realized in the next 10 years. Papandreou, the former manager of strategic partnerships at Google X and Waymo, key leaders in the development of automated vehicles, will deliver his wake-up call as our featured guest at the next What’s Now: San Francisco at Capgemini’s Applied Innovation Exchange.
Fixing our Broken Online Advertising Ecosystem from Facebook to Amazon
America’s got a fundamental problem with how information flows through its economy and society. Encouraged by a light touch regulatory framework, early internet business models - from Amazon to Facebook - have metastasized, in the process creating an information architecture that’s proven toxic to our society. As John Battelle, our guest at the January What’s Now: New York event, sees it, the problem comes down to who controls the flow of information in our increasingly interconnected world. But to understand that flow, we first have to visualize it, then we must imagine alternatives.
Recent Conversationssee all
One Plan that Can Solve Both the Pandemic & Climate Emergency at the Same Time
Almost overnight America has gone from a booming economy and full employment to an economy in free-fall and mass unemployment that soon will reach levels last seen at the height of The Great Depression. We are now in the midst of a pandemic emergency that may take trillions of dollars to solve. But the country is still in the midst of a slower moving but potentially more destructive climate emergency that also must be solved. Saul Griffith thinks now is the time to kill two birds with one stone with the ultimate infrastructure bill.
Our Moment of Radical Uncertainty and the Extreme Scenarios We Now Face
The coronavirus crisis arguably has thrown the world into a moment of profound uncertainty last seen in 1941 and the early years of World War II. This is the perfect time to use the proven tool of scenario planning in order to better understand the possible scenarios that lie ahead. And so we had a deep conversation with Peter Schwartz, an internationally renowned scenario planner who is the Chief Futures Officer and Senior Vice President for Strategic Planning at Salesforce. He led a team of people inside and outside Salesforce to quickly develop scenarios as the coronavirus crisis mushroomed.
George Church: A Peek at the Future of Synthetic Biology and Radical Wellness
George Church is one of the world’s leading geneticists. He is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and his innovations have contributed to nearly all "next generation" DNA sequencing methods. He has also pioneered new privacy, biosafety, environmental & biosecurity policies. Church is known for pioneering the specialized fields of personal genomics and synthetic biology.
How AI will Master Super-big Data and Connect Innovators Around the World
Brian Sager is a polymath and serial entrepreneur who has taken on fields as varied as biotechnology, clean energy and music. He most recent venture, Omnity, uses machine learning, and is in position to take on the challenge of searching and connecting the rush of data being produced in our digital world. Every day 10,000 new scientific papers are published, just in English, and other fields are also producing data at an extraordinary rate. No human being in any field can possibly keep up with all that new knowledge production.
The President and CEO of New America Discusses a Better Way to Solving Civic Problems
Ann-Marie Slaughter heads the nearly 20 year old New America - a think tank that considers itself "a civic platform that connects a research institute, technology lab, solutions network, media hub and public forum." Her wide-ranging and energizing conversation touched on many of the challenges and downsides of the new era of tech as as well as her optimism relating to how communities throughout the US are finding solutions.
The Author of The Lean Startup Has a New Project: Reinventing the Stock Exchange
Eric Ries, the bestselling author of Silicon Valley bible The Lean Startup, wants to accomplish something that many in the business world think will be harder than nuclear reactors: reinventing the stock exchange to prioritize long-term, rather than short-term, gains. The problems with our economy are so obvious that for the most part we don't talk about them anymore, says Ries, and many of them stem from the fact that elite decision makers have adopted an unusually short-term framework. This problem is further compounded because the number of decision makers today is much smaller than it used to be—there are half
Collaboration, Consensus, and Code: Building Trust One Block(chain) at a Time
Alex Tapscott, a blockchain investor, entrepreneur, and author, launched The Blockchain Research Institute with his father in 2017. The Institute, which is comprised of more than 50 companies and governments—including Tencent, IBM, and the government of Canada—employs more than 40 research associates around the world, all of whom are researching "the way blockchain is going to change everything," in Tapscott's words.
The Importance of Creativity and Gradual Learning for the 21st Century Worker
Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills, and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the Secretary-General at the OECD believes that in our new economy, skills matter much more than qualifications. Technology both replaces and complements workers, says Schleicher.
Aligning Our Policies with Where the Economy Is Going, Instead of Where It Is
Lenny Mendonca, Chair of the New America Foundation, sees strong parallels between our current economic moment and the tail-end of the Industrial Revolution, which coincided with the progressive movement of the late 20th century.
Revamping Our Education System to Be More Customized and More Playful
Niels Nielsen, Managing Director of the World Refugee School, is on a mission to make sure that the roughly 32 million refugee children around the world receive an education. If you add to this the number forcefully displayed children and people in fragile economies, the number of children who don't receive an education is as high as 600 million, says Nielsen. The World Refugee School aims to provide high-quality, inexpensive education to these children using technology.
Creating Tech That Improves Lives, and Doesn’t Just Displace Workers
Chief Scientist of Schmidt Futures and long-time technologist Stuart Feldman believes there are plenty of upsides to the technological advances of the last few decades, especially better products and better services, from new drugs to Google search. The threat of automation is far from new, Feldman points out, though the magnitude of this disruption is bigger than previous periods of disruption, like the 1880s or the 1950s.
Navigating a Potentially Precarious Future: How to Make the Most of Our Economy and Technology
Susan Lund, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, co-authored a December 2017 report titled "Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation." The report analyzes the future destruction and creation of jobs, as well as the rise of independent workers, thus making Lund an authority—or at least, as much of an authority as it's possible to be when forecasting the future—on the future of workers.
The Macro View on Transitioning to the Next Economy
In early December, the Berkeley Work and Intelligent Tools and Systems (WITS) working group hosted a conference to discuss working, earning, and learning in the age of intelligent tools. A number of conference participants sat down with Reinvent to talk about how they would explain the moment we're in, what challenges we face, what solutions might get us through these challenges, and how optimistic they are about our future. These innovators, hailing from UC Berkeley, McKinsey & Company, and Schmidt Sciences, OECD, among other organizations, shared their thoughts and insights on what many of them see as the biggest economic
California is the Future—of American Politics
At the inaugural TEDxOakland event in October, Reinvent Founder Peter Leyden explained how California sets the precedent for what happens in the rest of the nation—only 15 years early. From anti-immigrant backlash to corporate tax cuts, California has experienced many of the challenges and missteps that now face the United States as a whole, and came out on the other side as the progressive economic powerhouse it is today (though of course, not without its own problems, including income inequality and an affordable housing crisis). Peter also makes this case more comprehensively in his "California Is the Future" Medium series,
Determining Bargaining Power in the Platform Economy
Our political system has been hacked by time, circumstance, chaos, and disaster, says UC Berkeley Economics Professor Brad DeLong. He pointed to the failings of the electoral college, the fact that "small states hacked the constitution in 1787, so we now have a world in which the minority in the Senate represents 175 million people, while the majority represents 145 million people", and the gerrymandering after the 2010 census as the primary examples of this dysfunction.
The Pending Collapse of the Oil Market, and An Optimistic Vision for Our Climate
Carl Pope, former Chairman of the Sierra Club and co-author, along with Michael Bloomberg, of Climate of Hope: How Cities, Businesses, and Citizens Can Save the Planet is more optimistic than many other experts when it comes to solving climate change.
In the Wake of the Senate’s Tax Bill, What Does Our Economic Future Look Like?
Laura Tyson, Faculty Director of the Institute for Business & Social Impact at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, took some time out of her day at a conference hosted by Berkeley and the OECD titled “Working, Earning, Learning In The Age Of Intelligent Tools” to share her thoughts on the future of work.
Pew’s Director of Internet Research Talks Revolutions, Rapid Adoption, and Attitudes Towards Tech
Lee Rainie, Director of Internet, Science and Technology Research at Pew Research Center, believes we are in the middle of the fourth major technology-based revolution of the 21st century.
Empowerment or Exploitation? A Five-Part Process for Evaluating Platforms
Sangeet Choudary, an entrepreneur and best-selling business author, makes a compelling case that the platform economy is better suited to certain types of work than others—namely, work that is highly differentiated, rather than work that is commoditized.
The Case for Replicating Online Platforms, Not Scaling Them
Martjin Arets, an international expert on the emergence and development of the collaborative economy, has studied and discussed the sharing economy in many European countries. Arets sees a difference between sharing economy innovation in the northern half of the continent, which he says is focused more on online platforms, and the southern half, which is focused more on offline sharing, like cooperatives.
Horizontal Expansion and Minimal Regulation in China’s Sharing Economy
Kai Jia, a lecturer at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China and visiting scholar at UC Davis, talks about two models of the sharing economy: one requires the platform to own little capital, like Airbnb and Uber (or Didi Chuxing, largest ride-sharing platform in China). The other model is capital intensive.
Booming Growth, Bike-Sharing, and Big Brother: the Sharing Economy in China
Veteran reporter and Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society Orville Schell has covered China for decades, and recently accompanied President Trump to Asia as a Vanity Fair correspondent. Trump loves to be pandered to, Schell pointed out, and cares more about whether he's "winning" the leader of a foreign country than advancing the national interests of the United States.
The Search for Stability in an Unstable Economic Landscape
Bloomberg Beta Head Roy Bahat may spend his days "slinging money around," as he phrases it, discovering and investing in hot new artificial intelligence (AI) startups, but he devotes much of his free time helping to imagine and plan for the future of work.
Trusting Strangers, Not Institutions—Navigating the Complicated Landscape of Platforms
World-renowned trust expert and University of Oxford lecturer Rachel Botsman's new book, Who Can You Trust? How Technology Brought Us Together – and Why It Could Drive Us Apart, explores questions of transparency, scale, and ownership that are at the heart of the sharing economy.
Aligning Today’s Learning with Tomorrow’s Economic Reality
How can we better prepare everyone from teens to Millennials for a more decentralized and increasingly independent future of work? The skills needed to thrive in the 21st century workforce are substantively different than those needed in the 20th century, as we shift to a more digital, entrepreneurial and flexible society. Yet both educational institutions and workforce development programs have largely failed to keep pace with these changes. By 2027, more than half of all U.S. workers are expected to be self-employed.
Using AI and Blockchain Technology to Increase the Value of Our Work
Esko Kilpi, founder of the research and strategy group Esko Kilpi Company, is bold enough to defy the consensus of all of our other Future of Work interviews and argue work is, in fact, not changing. "Work has always been the same thing and work is always going to be the same thing," Kilpi says.
Reducing the Administrative Burden for Independent Workers
Cassie Divine, Business Leader for the Self-Employed Segment within Intuit’s Small Business Division, identifies three main problems of independent workers: untangling business expenses from personal, getting paid gross income (often inconsistently), and filing taxes. The biggest pain point overall, Divine says, is finding work and getting paid for that work. Quickbooks Self-Employed seeks to mitigate the administrative burdens faced by independent workers, so they can focus more on the actual work, and less on the attendant responsibilities that come with this work.
Distributing Wealth and Mitigating Inequality in Our 21st Century Digital Economy
UC Berkeley Political Science Professor John Zysman and UC Davis Community and Regional Development Professor Martin Kenney published the paper "The Rise of the Platform Economy" in the journal Issues in Science and Technology in 2016, which argues that "we are in the midst of a reorganization of our economy in which the platform owners are seemingly developing power that may be even more formidable than was that of the factory owners in the early industrial revolution." The entity that has the algorithm and can extract value from the data they collect has the power, Kenney said in an interview
Building Up Social Capital to Strengthen Communities
Neal Gorenflo launched the sharing economy-focused news site Shareable in 2009, shortly after the beginning of the modern day sharing economy. A few years earlier, Gorenflo had an epiphany that led him to redirect his life from one that revolved around transactions to one that revolved around transformations.
Rural Communities and Independent Workers
Today, two out of five U.S. workers self-identify as independent. At the same time, more than half of all Americans live in urban areas. And both percentages are growing rapidly. Independent workers, in theory, shouldn’t need to concentrate in crowded urban areas with high costs of living.
Resurrecting the Idea of Government as the Steward of Public Good
Carmen Rojas, CEO of The Workers Lab, founded the workers lab because she wanted to help ensure that upward mobility remains a possibility in the American economy. Rojas spoke about the experience of her immigrant mother, who was offered workplace training, benefits, a living wage, and a no-interest loan to buy a house through her job cleaning an office building, all of which allowed her "a footstep into the middle class."
Can the Ideals of the Platform Co-op Movement Improve the World’s Largest Platforms?
Nathan Schneider, scholar-in-residence of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, views the origins of the digital platform as a direct response to the global financial crisis of 2008. This period of instability "required people to reconfigure their economic lives," Schneider says, "and they turned towards the platform economy out of need and hope."
The Future is Freelancing, Says Upwork’s CEO
"The old world is not coming back," Upwork CEO Stephane Kasriel predicts. "The future is much more independent than the past." Kasriel is well worth listening to in this regard, considering he runs the world's largest freelancing website, one that counts five million businesses and twelve million freelancers among its users.
New Ways to Protect and Organize Workers in the 21st Century
Natalie Foster, Co-Chair of the Economic Security Project, is helping figure out what the future of work looks like in an economy no longer bound by traditional 9-5 jobs, employee relations, or geographically organized unions. In this scenario, which is both our future, and increasingly, our reality, how can workers access benefits like workers comp and paid time off?
Who Benefits from a Distributed Workforce? Managing the Challenges
Patrick McKenna, a partner at HighRidge Global and an entrepreneur who has founded multiple companies focused on remote workers, thinks a more even geographic distribution of the mid-tech workforce could help start to bridge the political divides in our country.
Shifting Our Corporations to Meet the Needs of Independent Workers
Today, 40 percent of U.S. workers self-identify as independent, and their numbers are growing rapidly. It’s time to fully face up to this inexorable development and start a fundamental rethink of the way organizations treat and manage this increasingly critical part of their team.
Drawdown: The World’s First Comprehensive Plan to Reverse Global Warming
Renowned environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken believes that it is in our power to stop global warming, and his new book—Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming—lays out how we can do it.
“Urbanism for All”—Achieving a More Inclusive Prosperity through Cities
Richard Florida, City Lab Co-Founder and editor at large, sees the contemporary American city as a battleground for class conflict, and believes that the solution is more urbanism—specifically, what Florida terms "urbanism for all."
Using Cities to Pilot New Initiatives for Independent Workers
In the United States and around the world, public policy is increasingly outdated for today’s workplace realities. In the face of a federal government often paralyzed by partisanship and gridlock, it's time to start focusing on policy innovation at the local level, especially in cities. Given the seemingly endless list of problems that need fixing, where should an innovative mayor start?
From South Africa, to South Dakota, to Seoul: Empowering Independent Workers Around the World
April Rinne, a new economy advisor and investor who has traveled to 100 countries and worked in half of them in the field of economic development, sees the Internet as a great leveler. It lowers barriers to entry, Rinne explains, in terms of self-employment, starting a business, and applying to jobs.
From the Macro to the Micro: Understanding the Trends Shaping the Future of Work
Consultant and Charrette LLC Partner Gary Bolles wants to understand the macro trends that are changing the future of work, and then to use this understanding to help individuals thrive in this new economy. Bolles think the unbundling of industries (like media) and products (like the PC) is a large part of the reason that we're seeing a fundamental shift in the economy and the nature of work.
The Reinvention of America – Peter Leyden Keynote Presentation
In this keynote presentation at the American Planning Association (APA) conference, Peter Leyden makes the case for how the chaos and disruption of the early 21st century will yield a more digital, global, sustainable world.
Can Romance Protect Us From Robots?
Author and entrepreneur Tim Leberecht wrote the international bestseller The Business Romantic: Give Everything, Quantify Nothing, and Create Something Greater Than Yourself two years ago, in part as a response to our rampant tendency to over-quantify ourselves and our work. Leberecht believes that, particularly given the current transition to a more automated world, companies need to realize that efficiency alone isn't sufficient, and invest more in culture and relationships.
Ecology, Economy & Equity—Taking a Holistic View of Sustainability
Nikki Silvestri, Founder and CEO of Soil and Shadow, makes a strong case for a definition of sustainability in which ecology, economy, and equity are inextricably intertwined. This is the definition of sustainability she initially learned, Silvestri says, and the reason why it appealed to her much more than environmentalism.
Using Tourism Revenue to Strengthen Local Communities
Megan Epler Wood, the director of the International Sustainable Tourism Initiative at the Harvard School of Public Health, says there’s “no question” that sharing existing city space is good for the environment. The demand to build new hotels is incredibly high, according to Epler Wood, given that tourism is growing at twice the rate of global GDP.
Cooking in the Communal Kitchen: Incorporating Sharing into Everyday Life Through Cohousing
"Once you start thinking about it logically, it simply makes the most sense to not buy one of everything," says cohousing pioneer Charles Durrett.
Just Sustainabilities: Exploring the Intersection of Social Justice & Environmental Sustainability
Julian Agyeman, a professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, believes that social justice and environmental justice are—or at least, should be—inextricably intertwined. The question we need to be asking, Agyeman says, is how do we improve people's lives in a just and equitable manner, and how do we do that while living in the limits of supporting ecosystems? Agyeman cites research that demonstrates the link between social justice and environmental protection, adding, "Maybe the way we treat each other can be indicative of the way we treat the environment." He also speaks about the corrosiveness of
Protecting the Character of Tourist Destinations Through Sustainable Travel
Jonathan Tourtellot, the CEO of Designation Stewardship and a longtime veteran of National Geographic, believes that sustainable tourism means more than recycling and staying in LEED certified buildings. "To be truly sustainable, you want to protect the character of the place that people are coming to see," Tourtellot said.
Looking at the Sharing Economy as a Toolbox to Improve Cities
Pieter van de Glind and Harmen van Sprang, the co-founders of shareNL (a knowledge and networking platform for the Netherlands) and Sharing City Alliance (a global organization facilitating the interconnection of cities), are passionate advocates for the sharing economy's potential to transform cities. The business partners hail from Amsterdam, which incorporates the sharing economy into many aspects of everyday life, from peer-to-peer energy marketplaces to Park Fly Rent, a company that facilitates outgoing travelers in Amsterdam renting their cars to incoming tourists. "Digital is changing real behavior," van de Glind said. "We see this through the sharing economy." According to
The Emergence of the Commons-Oriented Collaborative Economy
Albert Cañigueral, the OuiShare Connector for Spain and Latin America, is a Barcelona-based sharing economy expert helping to organize the fifth edition of OuiShare Fest, which takes place this July in Paris. Cañigueral describes himself as passionate about, but also critical of, the burgeoning sharing economy.
Organizing Our Cities Around Autonomous Vehicles
If Donald Trump's election can be interpreted as a backlash against progress and the future, Robin Chase is here to say the future is coming much more quickly than many of us think, particularly where autonomous vehicles (AVs) are concerned. Chase, who co-founded Zipcar, believes that AVs will go on the market as early as 2020.
Harvard’s Resident Millennial Expert Talks Politics & the Sharing Economy
John Della Volpe, Director of Polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and Founder and CEO of SocialSphere, has been studying Millennials since 2000. It all started, said Della Volpe, with two Harvard students who wanted to survey Millennials and find out why they were volunteering but not voting. Della Volpe has been polling and analyzing this generation—which he defines as people born between 1980 and 2000—ever since.
The New Way Forward After Trump
One way to read the election of Donald Trump is that Americans want the current system - the way our economy, society and government work - to undergo a fundamental transformation. What is the beginning of a political grand strategy that plays off Trump and creates a more transformational way forward that actually solves the challenges of our times?
Potential Pathways for Disruptive Companies
Sunil Paul co-founded Sidecar in 2011 on a novel premise—that technology could allow anyone to become a driver and accept money for that ride. According to Paul, Sidecar, which was purchased by General Motors in early 2016, pioneered the term "ride sharing".
How Cities Around the World Approach the Sharing Economy
Sharing economy expert and advisor April Rinne has traveled to almost 100 countries and worked in around 50 of them. "None define sharing the same way," Rinne says, though she adds that the most general definition of the sharing economy involves sharing under-utilized assets, spaces, and skills.
“Innovate or Die” – How Disruption Pays Off in the Long-Term
Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), believes that while regulation isn't necessarily bad, it shouldn't be over-intrusive. The Disruptive Innovation Council, a subset of the CTA, does market research and lobbies governments in the hopes of promoting the idea that innovation is great for society.
Will Crowd-Based Capitalism Replace Managerial Capitalism?
Arun Sundararajan, a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business and author of the recent book The Sharing Economy, believes crowd-based capitalism could replace managerial capitalism in the next 10-20 years. Sundararajan believes crowd-based capitalism is an inherently superior model, one that uses resources more efficiently, which tends to result in increased economic productivity.
Home-Sharing as a Means of Sustainable and Personalized Tourism
Francesco Rutelli, former Mayor of Rome and a member of Airbnb's Mayoral Advisory Board, wants tourists visiting Italy to take full advantage of the wealth of culture that Italy has to offer. Rutelli believes that Airbnb is part of the answer to the question of how to provide tourists with personalized experiences.
The Author of “Sharing Nicely” Analyzes Society’s Progress Over a Decade Later
Yochai Benkler, Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, first explored the potential of the modern sharing economy in a Yale Law Review article in 2004, and is credited as one of the first people to articulate the concept. More than a decade later, Benkler spoke about how our reality measures up to his initial conception.
Bringing People and Places to the Table
Professor and documentarian Douglas Rushkoff, author most recently of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, doesn't blame the billionaires for income inequality—he blames the operating system. "It's not about redistributing the spoils of capitalism after the fact," said Rushkoff, "It's about pre-distributing the means of production before the fact."
Houston’s Response to the Sharing Economy’s Regulatory Challenges
Annise Parker, the mayor of Houston, Texas, from 2010 until January 2016, is well-accustomed to navigating the often murky waters of sharing economy regulation. Parker's first experience with the sharing economy was using Zipcar's technology to manage Houston's fleet of light-duty vehicles.
Using Technology to Create a New Operating System for Cities
Stephen Yarwood, the former Lord Mayor of Adelaide, Australia, is a firm believer in our digital future. "I've always been convinced that technology was going to not only drive change, but create a new operating system for cities," said Yarwood.
Improving Platforms, Policies & Partnerships to Fight Discrimination
Laura Murphy, the former head of the American Civil Liberties Union's DC legislative office, recently conducted a 90-day review of discrimination on Airbnb. Murphy says that she believes it's in the enlightened self-interest of not only Airbnb, but all sharing economy companies, to make a sustained effort to serve entire communities, not just an elite market share.
Optimizing Our WTF Economy for the Long-Term
Tim O'Reilly, Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, believes we should rethink the world using today's technology. "Let's stop optimizing for the short-term. Let's start optimizing for the long-term, and think about how to make the society we want," O'Reilly says.
Creating New Norms for the Way We Work Today
Co-Founder of Peers.org Natalie Foster is a strong proponent of creating a new social safety net outside the bounds of traditional employment. Even if we wanted to bring back the unionized jobs that built the American middle class, Foster says, we can't. "Work is shifting away from protected jobs, and towards service and retail sectors."
A Proposal for Universal Basic Income from the Former President of SEIU
Andrew Stern, former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and author of Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream, believes a universal basic income is the best way for the United States to deal with massive changes in our economy—changes that will only be exacerbated by increasing automation.
How Couchsurfing Became One of the Largest Trust Experiments of All Time
Co-Founder of Couchsurfing Casey Fenton believes that people are fundamentally good and want to help each other. Fenton, who founded Couchsurfing in 2003 as a way to explore the world and meet new people while saving resources, describes Couchsurfing as a "backstage pass to the world."
A Regulative Pathway from the Former Mayor of Philadelphia
Mayor Nutter believes that city officials should first and foremost remain open to the possibility of disruptive companies that can provide new or better services to their constituents. While he admits there is no one-size-fits-all method to regulating and taxing the sharing economy, Mayor Nutter believes that it will continue to evolve and remain in demand, particularly among Americans concentrated in city centers.
Harnessing Creativity & Technology to Meet the Needs of Ordinary People
Palak Shah is the Social Innovations Director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), the leading voice for the millions of women who work as domestic workers, women who have been excluded from U.S. labor laws for decades. She is optimistic that tech, governments, and social movements can collaborate to make positive changes in the lives of workers.
The Multi-Millionaire Who’s Fighting for $15
Entrepreneur and investor Nick Hanauer, one of the most vocal proponents of raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, wants his fellow one percenters to understand the importance of addressing income inequality. No one has a bigger stake in a thriving middle class than the wealthy, Hanauer said.
Exploring the Honeycomb of the Collaborative Economy
Founder of Crowd Companies Jeremiah Owyang thinks that the sharing economy—though he prefers the term collaborative economy—could exceed PwC's projections of $335 billion in revenue by 2025. "There's really no question whether it's going to happen or not," Owyang said of the high rates of adoption of peer-to-peer platforms.
Protecting Workers in a Highly Decentralized Workplace
Michelle Miller, Co-Founder and Co-Director of Coworker.org, thinks that in the not-so distant future, work could mean long periods of short-term employment and short periods of having a single job. Coworker.org, which Miller describes as a digital platform for worker voices, facilitates networking and activism among workers at decentralized workplaces, from Starbucks baristas to Uber drivers.
Speeding the Pace of Evolution to Avoid Revolution
Zipcar Co-Founder Robin Chase believes the status quo is broken, and that sharing economy platforms—which she refers to as "peers inc"—can help rebuild a new status quo. Chase devised the "peers inc" terminology because of the mutual importance of what she sees as two halves of the sharing economy equation: the platform and the peers.
Is the Sharing Economy Part of the Solution to Our Planet’s Limited Resources?
Yerdle Co-Founder Adam Werbach has perhaps the broadest possible definition of the sharing economy. Werbach sees the sharing economy as not Silicon Valley-driven, but rather as an old way of doing things, one that encompasses any joint use of resources, from libraries to roads.
Why Are Americans So Afraid?
The world is by and large a safer, less violent place today than it has been for the past 200 years, yet Americans live in more fear than perhaps ever in the country’s history. How did this happen and what is America afraid of? What should America be afraid of?
How the Threat of Climate Change Could Draw the U.S. and China Closer
The relationship between the United States and China is the most important bilateral relationship in the world today, and it isn't in great shape. Yet despite the fact that tensions are running high between the U.S. and China, cooperation is budding in the clean energy space. China and the U.S. are collaborating on a variety of bilateral projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in China and strengthen the energy efficiency relationship between the U.S. and China.
Tackling the Global Unemployment Crisis in the Interests of Peace
Widespread unemployment, especially among young men, creates conditions that are ripe for social unrest, radicalization, and crime. This was the case in Europe and Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, and is the case in the Middle East and elsewhere now. How can the U.S. government and private sector investors accelerate economic development in countries with high unemployment and rising violence?
Making American Foreign Affairs Reporting Great Again
During the heyday of print reporting, most major U.S. newspapers had a sizable number of foreign bureaus. The advent of Internet news and the subsequent downsizing of newspapers and traditional media organizations have drastically altered how national security and foreign affairs are covered in the United States. Many reporters covering foreign affairs do so from the U.S., meaning that they have less access to sources on the ground, and thus are less able to successfully challenge the official D.C. narrative.
Preparing for the Security Threat of Zika and Future Global Pandemics
The Zika virus and other global pandemics represent a serious and often underestimated 21st-century security threat. Globalization and the ease of international travel have facilitated the spread of infectious diseases in unprecedented ways, and the U.S. is primed to take the lead in creating a new, global health security infrastructure.
Resolving Tensions Between Individual Privacy and National Security
Apple CEO Tim Cook's open letter explaining why Apple refuses to create software for the FBI has far-reaching implications for the ongoing tug-of-war between privacy and security. Perhaps now even more so than when Edward Snowden's initial revelations were published, privacy and security are often portrayed as being diametrically opposed.
Using the Long-term Oil Glut & Clean Energy Opportunities to Rethink Middle East Policy
While drastically low gas prices may not mean anything more than savings at the pump for the average American consumer, shifts in global oil prices and production could bring the Middle East to the precipice of transformation. The flooded oil market - the result of U.S. production of shale oil (which has almost doubled since 2009) and Iran’s recent release from sanctions - indicates that oil's role in the world is fundamentally shifting.
Navigating An Ever-Evolving U.S./Russia Relationship
Much of the American foreign policy establishment views Russia as either an aggressive adversary or a declining power stirring up conflict to compensate for its growing irrelevance. Half of all Americans thought the U.S. was heading into another Cold War with Russia during the height of the conflict between Russian and the Ukraine in March of 2014, according to Gallup polls. Can we prevent a new Cold War and engage Russia in ways that promote global peace and security?
Study What You Love: When Seemingly Impractical Advice Pays Off
In just over a decade, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Soraya Darabi has already achieved a career trajectory that many business students only dream of. In addition to interning Sony Music and the WashingtonPost.com while studying at Georgetown, Darabi has worked at CondeNet (the digital division of Condé Nast), the New York Times (she brought the paper onto social media), and a cloud computing company that was later purchased by Facebook. Darabi has co-founded and invested in multiple startups, including Foodspotting, a geo-location mobile app, and Zady, an e-commerce platform that aims to provide transparency and authenticity to its customers.
Deciding Whether to Reinvest in 21st-Century Nuclear Weapons
It's been 70 years since the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ushering in the age of nuclear weapons - and a new arms race. For decades, the United States raced the Soviet Union to build up the triad of nuclear weapons systems: intercontinental ballistic missiles, long-range bombers, and submarines. The aging of the nuclear arsenal may present the best opportunity we've had in the last 70 years to phase out nuclear weapons. Are there ways to let go of nuclear weapons without sacrificing American security and peace of mind?
Featured Innovatorsexplore network
Paul Hawken
Executive Director of Project Drawdown
Michael Pollan
Bestselling author & lecturer on food, agriculture, health & the environment
Michael Tubbs
Mayor of Stockton, CA
Jane McGonigal
World-Renowned Game Designer & Bestselling Author
Carmen Rojas
CEO, The Workers Lab
Steven Chu
Former United States Secretary of Energy
June Cohen
Co-Founder & CEO, WaitWhat
Kevin Kelly
Senior Maverick at WIRED Magazine
Linda Avey
Co-founder of 23andMe and Precise.ly
Tim O’Reilly
Founder of O'Reilly Media & Host of Next:Economy Conference
Richard Florida
Co-Founder & Editor at Large, City Lab
Bill McKibben
Founder of 350.org
Jennifer Granholm
Former Governor of Michigan
Ed Lu
Executive Director, B612 Asteroid Institute
Jose Antonio Vargas
Journalist, Filmmaker & Immigration Activist
Jen Pahlka
Founder & Executive Director of Code for America
Tristan Harris
Co-Founder & Executive Director, Center for Humane Technology
Vivienne Ming
Co-Founder & Managing Partner of Socos LLC
Craig Newmark
Founder of craigslist & Nerd-in-Residence at the VA Center for Innovation
Scott Galloway
Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, Serial Entrepreneur and Author
Gavin Newsom
Governor of California
Gary Marcus
Scientist, Author, and Entrepreneur
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The Coronavirus Crisis Creates the Opportunity for Fundamental Reinvention
Reinvent is a company on a mission to help reinvent our world by driving conversations with leading innovators about how to solve the many challenges of our time. Since 2012 we have been connecting up networks of remarkable people from diverse fields in virtual and physical events to focus on how to overcome a big challenge and find better ways forward. We open up these deep-dive conversations to sophisticated audiences who want to understand what’s possible in the near future. Reinvent is based in San Francisco and partners with organizations out to drive more innovation and change the world for the better. The Coronavirus Crisis has made our mission more relevant than ever. Now is the time to reinvent our world.