Upscaling strategies in the sharing economy

This paper examines what enables and constrains upscaling, understood as expanding the customer base and the target geographies, in the sharing economy from an integrated business, technological and socio-spatial perspective. First, it conceptualises the sharing economy in three dimensions by elaborating on business model innovation, socio-technical digital platform design and geographical embeddedness. Second, the paper develops a novel typology of upscaling patterns including “born global”, “local value potentially global”, “local infrastructure as product services” and “co-created services”. The analysis is based on 30 semi-structured interviews with the founders and senior managers of UK sharing platforms in three sectors and an analysis of platform web sites.