Together with Peerby
How could new revenue streams enable sustainable growth?
Taking Peerby’s unique resources and capabilities as a starting point, it quickly became evident that their intangible assets could be turned into additional revenue streams for other target groups. But who would pay for this?
A proven concept
Peerby offers a sustainable alternative for buying products by sharing products with your community. In this project, Innoboost and Peerby explored how the value proposition and business model can be enhanced to generate revenue for Peerby in a circular way. Why are users renting or borrowing appliances from their community?
Learnings from the community
Peerby has a large community, which also means it has access to a lot of knowledge, skills, networks, and tips and tricks. Community members could perform services for each other, which creates employment; they could link a person to someone else, answer questions, or share tips and tricks on how to get the job done more effectively. How can Peerby use (intangible) assets from the Peerby community to generate revenue through a sustainable business model? And why would consumers participate? What drives them to share their resources & capabilities with neighbors?
Peerby allows you to borrow items from your neighbors. By connecting people with each
other and encouraging collaborative consumption, where not everyone has to own a product, Peerby aims to establish an alternative for our consumption-driven throw away culture.
Selecting business models
Most of the resources and capabilities of Peerby were intangible, like having the knowledge and experience to start a community, real-life data on when products break down, or their ability to steer community members to specific locations. We asked ourselves for each of these assets: who would be interested in this? Real estate agents might be interested in how often neighbors borrow something from each other because it expresses ‘trust’ in their neighborhood. Postal services might be interested in community members who can take packages with them if they go in a certain direction. Governments might be interested in Peerby’s knowledge of how to stimulate sharing.
To select the most promising directions, we judged ideas based on three criteria:
• How well does it fit Peerby’s mission to move away from the throw-away culture?
• What is the estimated business potential?
• Is it scalable?
Rethinking the system
None of the selected directions was targeted at paying community members. The ideas were
derivatives of their core business, ‘borrowing or renting items from your neighbors.’ Although we learned that the Circular Economy's goal is first and foremost about closing,
narrowing, or slowing resource flows, intangible resources, such as data, knowledge, and experiences, should not be forgotten as they can add more value to your offering. Rethinking the system goes beyond materials.
