The Sharing Economy: Review and Reflection

Running Head: BUSINESS INFORMATION SYSTEMS
The Sharing Economy: Review and Reflection
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1BUSINESS INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Executive Summary
This report discusses about the concept of sharing economy as well as crowdsourcing of funds.
In the first section, the concept of sharing economy on a broad sense has been explained with
suitable examples. In the next section, the benefits and limitations of sharing economy have been
discussed and the concept has been evaluated accordingly. In the following sections, sharing
economy has been explained with the help of new concepts like crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is
the source of investment for a number of organizations that are looking to setup a new business.
Finally, a reflective analysis has been conducted in which personal reflections on sharing
economy have been discussed.

2BUSINESS INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Table of Contents
1.0 Introduction................................................................................................................................3
2.0 Sharing Economy.......................................................................................................................3
2.1 Sharing Economy Explanation..............................................................................................3
2.2 Benefits and Limitations of Sharing Economy......................................................................5
3.0 Crowdsourcing...........................................................................................................................6
3.1 Crowdsourcing Website.........................................................................................................6
3.2 Request and Alignment with Sharing Economy....................................................................8
3.3 Chance of Success for the Request........................................................................................9
3.4 Contribution to Sharing Economy.......................................................................................10
4.0 Reflection on Sharing Economy..............................................................................................10
5.0 Future of Sharing Economy.....................................................................................................11
6.0 Conclusion...............................................................................................................................13
References......................................................................................................................................14

3BUSINESS INFORMATION SYSTEMS
1.0 Introduction
Sharing economy is a concept of economy in which sharing of resources occur between
two or more user groups. Each of the user group has its own usage of a particular resource and
sharing economy allows them to share the resource such that both of them are able to gather
benefits from the same (Cusumano 2017). This is almost identical to the positive symbiotic
relationship where two different organisms get benefits out of each other. One of the most
common examples of sharing economy is crowdsourcing or crowdfunding in which various
entities or user groups invest in a project where the project manager or developer does not have
sufficient amount of resources to fund for the project.
In this report, sharing economy has been broadly discussed and explained in order to
understand the actual concept of the same. Furthermore, a crowdfunding website has been
selected and a particular project in it has been used for analysis.
2.0 Sharing Economy
2.1 Sharing Economy Explanation
Sharing economy is a type of economy where various sources (open source) consume on
a particular property or resource on a sharing basis. The most basic example of sharing economy
is house rent in which, the owner of the house lets another user to stay in it at a certain expense
(rent). Sharing economy is facilitated by open source media especially the internet where large
number of users can interact with each other for sharing a resource or property (Hawksworth and
Vaughan 2014). Previously, sharing economy was limited to simple rents and services but with
the extensive use of the internet around the world, sharing economy has become much more