The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

bags. But, of course, intangible goods and services don’t work this way. They are “nonrival,” which means you can rent the same movie to as many people who want to rent it this hour. Sharing intangibles scales magnificently. This ability to share on a large scale without diminishing the satisfaction of the individual renter is transformative.

And on demand is biased toward access over ownership. Decentralization

Rival means that there is a zero-sum game; only one rival prevails. If I am renting your boat, no one else can.

Of course, renters are disadvantaged as well because they may not gain all the benefits of traditional ownership, such as rights of modification, long-term access, or gains in value.

The downside to the traditional rental business is the “rival” nature of physical goods.

Our appetite for the instant is insatiable. The cost of real-time engagement requires massive coordination and degrees of collaboration that were unthinkable a few years ago.

Take transportation as an example.

The general approach for entrepreneurs is to unbundle the benefits of transportation (or any X) into separate constituent goods and then recombine them in new ways.

One reason so much money is flowing into the service frontier is that there are so many more ways to be a service than to be a product.