 This is now exploding across all of the domain of services from dog walkers to on-demand physicians. It's the first new economic system to enter out to the world stage, since capitalism and socialism in the 19th century. Is it going to get away? Is it going to get bigger and transform? Or even spell the end of capitalism? An externalization of risk onto this population so that instead of just flexibility and independence, we're also getting extreme disruption. Many people don't even care that it's the sharing economy anymore. They just think it's a better way to do things. We've been talking about the sharing economy for over a decade, and even in the face of regulatory backlash, it shows few signs of slowing down. Alternative forms of employment, characteristic of the gig economy, have become so mainstream, few of us think twice about hopping into a stranger's car or even inhabiting someone else's home, thanks to the mobile apps that connect us. What forces continue to power the sharing economy? And how has it changed all these years later? The fundamental principle of the sharing economy is actually based on economic efficiency. It will allow you to dramatically increase your aggregate efficiency at every step of conversion on your value chain. The idea is that there's all these assets in the world that are unutilized. Think about apartments, think about cars, many other things. Energy, value, people's skills, people's time, money. If you think about a car today, a car is used 5% of the time, 95% of the time, it's not used. It actually uses valuable space in our cities because it's parked somewhere. Then what technology does is it enables us to unlock the value of those assets and make it liquid through networks and marketplaces. Theoretically today we would be able to run a city such as New York, or Paris, or London, or Singapore, or Turin, a bigger city or a smaller city with just a fraction of the cars we have today. I really think there's two key enablers about the sharing economy. The first is about real-time information in our pockets, but then the other thing is data. I would say data is the clue behind the sharing economy. It's interesting to me the conversation about the sharing economy today because I wrote my book in 2009. Companies that we now sort of see as the poster children for the sharing economy, Airbnb, Uber, how fast they were able to grow because traditional industries just didn't see them as a threat. I think one of the things that is different is have they become too big. In cities around the world, local populations do worry that they have indeed become too big and in the case of home sharing have banded together to restrict these activities within their communities. How might regulation protect their interests without stifling innovation? You know what's interesting is I don't think one country has got the regulatory approach to this right. You know, like it always happens when you've got new technologies, then we need a little bit of time in order to adjust to them, to create new policies. You see best practices in different parts of the world. It doesn't make sense that if you need to get a car, you need to look at 10 or 20 different apps. At the same time, we want to make sure that people take pay taxes when they rent their apartments. In the UK, for example, Osborne implemented this new tax law that the first £5,000 that you earned off shared assets, whether that was renting out your driveway, renting out your home, would be subject to a different tax structure. And this was really interesting because it actually created an incentive for people to declare what they were earning off these platforms. It depends on what firms do. It depends on what NGOs do. It depends on what policy do, but it is a critical requirement that we build systems that reincorporate the social into the economy. The important thing is that still we have a very powerful force in order to make our cities more sustainable and more social. It's still very early days in terms of regulation. In China, where the government has named the sharing economy a national priority, it has been able to thrive like nowhere else. Although some experts warn a correction is on the horizon, in 2016 the Chinese sharing economy reportedly accounted for over $500 billion in transactions. Platforms that have been difficult to crack in other parts of the world, peer-to-peer rental of goods, is booming in China. It's partly because there's real problems to solve. To me, China is the biggest potential market for the sharing economy in the world, bigger than the United States for sure. You move through that early adoption phase pretty quickly in China and then it's a hockey stick growth that we just don't see in other parts of the world. You can share a basketball for $0.15 an hour. Need to charge your phone? There's a power bank share for that. And then came the shared beds, which many called napping pods. I think also in China there is a different relationship between individual ownership and shared access to things. People wanting the benefit of products and services versus needing to own them outright has really gained traction. This more flexible notion of ownership can be observed more widely and certainly beyond Asia. What does this shift in thinking mean for individual ownership? It's not the end of individual ownership. There's many categories of assets where people will not share them because there is not the incentive or there is too much friction to sharing them. Don't get too excited when people tell you you'll be able to have a new app that will allow you to share umbrellas or a drill. There's some things where it doesn't make sense. Even if you use it very little, some objects in your home it still makes sense to own it because their cost is not that much. So goods that you use on a daily basis. There's also many goods where there is still an immense stigma attached to sharing so close for many people. But for other more substantial piece of urban infrastructure there we can really make a dent. I think what we're seeing is a shift in attitudes towards what ownership really means and the relationship between ownership and identity. So the concept of sharing economy is not new. We've seen it around for a few years now but what is happening is that little by little it is moving into new dimensions. So my parents generation, what they owned, the car they drove around in the brands that they wore was one of the fundamental expressions of their identity and their status. So it becomes another way to show our values and to show stages. So I prefer the term sort of digital social identity versus digital footprint and that's where I think people are trying to reconcile what is their true self. So if you look at the future we might have a future where we'll be able to be conspicuous but without physical consumption.