Robin Chase
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Co-Founder of Zipcar and Transportation Innovator
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Speaker on Innovation, Sustainability, and the Future of Mobility
Robin Chase Speaker Biography
Robin Chase, co-founder of Zipcar, the world’s largest car-sharing company, is a trailblazer in the fields of entrepreneurship, transportation, and environmental sustainability. Her visionary approach to business and transportation has not only changed the way we think about car ownership but has also paved the way for a more collaborative and environmentally conscious economy. Chase’s insights are rooted in her extensive experience in building companies at the intersection of technology and shared value, making her a leading voice on innovation, the sharing economy, and the transformative power of technology in solving some of today’s most pressing challenges.
Chase’s engaging narratives are filled with lessons from her entrepreneurial journey, offering actionable strategies for innovation, leadership, and sustainability. Her ability to connect with audiences comes from a genuine passion for creating positive change, blending thought-provoking ideas with practical solutions. Robin Chase provides audiences a unique opportunity to explore the future of mobility, urban living, and sustainable business practices. She inspires individuals and organizations to think differently about their roles in shaping a better future.
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Speech Topics
People-Powered Innovation
As the rates of innovation and disruption increase, a new organizational framework, Peers Inc., provides a way of reducing innovation risk, and increasing confidence in decision making. By enabling innovation—1) creating a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship; 2) reducing barriers and costs to experimentation; and 3) reducing the costs of the innovation inputs—government and big companies can make it possible for people to do the changing themselves. In this talk, Robin Chase—founder of car-sharing service Zipcar—discusses people-powered innovation.
Collaborative Economy
Sharing is good! An unlikely partnership is creating the smartest, biggest and strongest companies. People working on platforms mean efficiently used resources, co-investment from others, low-cost innovation and very fast learning.
The Future of Transportation
Technology is transforming the ease and convenience of accessing a car instead of owning it, and cities are getting fed up with valuable city streets being clogged with idle parked cars and vehicles in motion holding just one person. Zipcar, Uber and Lyft, transit apps, and autonomous vehicle pilots are all signs of the incredible disruption that is upon us.The future is going to be multi-modal, shared, and ultimately automated.
What will this future look like? How soon is it coming? What are the implications for cities and the 20% of the economy that is driven by the automotive sector?
Business Consulting from Robin Chase: Shifting Paradigms to Disrupt Your Industry
Bringing in a business consultant can challenge you and your organization to think differently about your business. Whether you are a new leader seeking a renewed vision for your company or a seasoned C-Suite executive exploring new trends in the marketplace, they provide the deep, strategic insights and much-needed perspective to help you make confident and profitable decisions.
Robin Chase, former CEO of Zipcar, unpacks the underlying principles that enabled a startup to transform an industry. Zipcar harnessed technology and marketing to change the way people own and use cars; the ways cities are lived in and built; and altered prejudices about the incompatibility of environmentalism and capitalism. As one of the pioneers of the sharing economy, Chase can help your executive leadership team understand where to look for innovation and how to enable it.
Her advisory topics include:
Business Growth
Business Trend Analysis
Cultivating Innovation and Creativity
Leadership in a Cyber World
Sharing: A Simple Approach for Maximizing ROI
Zipcar succeeded because it created a platform for the sharing of excess capacity (idle car hours), which reduced costs for everyone who uses the asset. By taking a closer look at the anatomy of sharing (personal, institutional, web 2.0) and dimensions of the assets (physical, digitial, temporal, synergistic, collaborative) we can turn perceptions of scarcity (and cost centers) into a reality of abundance (and profit, innovation centers).
Beyond Web 2.0 (Collaborative Production): Collaborative Consumption, Financing & Infrastructure
The online web 2.0 phenomenon of collaborative production is much loved because of its speed and scalability. Zipcar is an example of collaborative consumption, financing, and infrastructure (a distributed nationwide fleet in existence because of the aggregated demands of its members). Reconceptualizing what it means to collaborate offers an intriguing new way to think about infrastructure investment. What does it mean to create platforms to enable participation?
More Meadows
The strength and resilience of meadows are derived from their diversity, ability to evolve, and collaboration within the system. In highly dynamic environments characterized by uncertainty about the future, we need to reduce risk and increase the likelihood of survival. The key is to ensure that institutions (and governments) have laid the foundations that foster experimentation, permit learning, and ultimately evolution of successful new businesses that take advantage of unexploited openings (where there is excess capacity) in the ecosystem. In economics, we call these randomized field experiments. Creating more meadows is an important risk reduction and innovation strategy.
