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Robin Chase    

Award-Winning Transportation Entrepreneur, Founder & Former CEO of Zipcar; Author; Board Member at Tucows

Robin Chase is a transportation entrepreneur known for founding and being the former CEO of "Zipcar," the largest carsharing company in the world. She also co-founded "Veniam," a network company that moves terabytes of data between vehicles and the cloud. In 2019, she co-founded her first nonprofit, NUMO, a global alliance to channel the opportunities presented by new urban mobility technologies to build cities that are sustainable and just. Her influential work is captured in her book "Peers Inc: How People and Platforms are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism."

Chase serves as the Executive Chairman of "Veniam" and is Chair of the public company "Tucows." She also holds positions on the Dutch multinational DSM’s Sustainability Advisory Board and the Boards of the World Resources Institute and Tucows. Previously, she has served on numerous boards including the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, the French National Digital Agency, and the National Advisory Council for Innovation & Entrepreneurship for the US Department of Commerce.

Widely recognized for her contributions to innovation, design, and environment, Chase has received accolades such as the Urban Land Institute’s Nichols Prize as an Urban Visionary, and has been named one of Time 100 Most Influential People. She lectures extensively, discussing topics such as the future of transportation, the collaborative economy, and sustainable urban mobility. Chase holds a degree from Wellesley College, an MBA from MIT's Sloan School of Management, was a Harvard University Loeb Fellow, and received an honorary Doctorate of Design from the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Speech Topics

People-Powered Innovation

Innovation is a country's lifeblood. Imagine if our lives stayed exactly the same! On the other hand, people hate change because they can't quite see the future; it can be unnerving. And big companies and governments (who occasionally respond to their constituents who like the status quo) are not that easy to change.

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 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.

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.

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?

Sharing: A Simple Approach for Maximizing ROI

Zipcar succeeds 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).

News

Zipcar Founder Robin Chase on Starting Buzzcar and a Portugal ...
How did Zipcar come about? I had a co-founder, and she's German and was on vacation in Germany, where car sharing existed. She was sitting in a cafe, saw a  ...

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