Robin Chase Speaker Biography
Co-Founder and Former CEO of Buzzcar, Zipcar, and GoLocco
Robin Chase is a transportation entrepreneur. She is co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar, founded in 2000, the world’s leading car sharing network; as well as co-founder of Veniam, founded in 2012, 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 book is Peers Inc: How People and Platforms are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism.
Affiliations
In addition to Ms. Chase’s position as Chair of the Tucows Board, she sits on the boards of World Resources Institute, and serves on the Dutch multinational DSM’s Sustainability Advisory Board. In the past, she served on the boards of Veniam and the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, the French National Digital Agency, the National Advisory Council for Innovation and Entrepreneurship for the US Department of Commerce, the Intelligent Transportations Systems Program Advisory Committee for the US Department of Transportation, the OECD’s International Transport Forum Advisory Board, the Massachusetts Governor’s Transportation Transition Working Group, and Boston Mayor’s Wireless Task Force.
Honors and Awards
Transportation speaker Robin Chase lectures widely, has been frequently featured in the major media, and has received many awards in the areas of innovation, design, and environment, including the prestigious Urban Land Institute’s Nicols Prize as Urban Visionary, Time 100 Most Influential People, Fast Company Fast 50 Innovators, and BusinessWeek Top 10 Designers. Robin graduated from Wellesley College and 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.
Robin Chase Speaking Topics
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
The Future of Transportation in the 21st Century
The future of transportation is urban and multi-modal. Picture cities with one-tenth the cars! We'll choose and move seamlessly using different types of transportation for each and every trip, with an explosion of both public and private offerings. And not too far into the future, autonomous vehicles will change everything; they could be the ultimate in public transportation and wreak havoc with employment.
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.
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.
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.
Robin Chase Books
Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism
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Robin Chase Articles
Robin Chase Speaker Testimonials
“Things went absolutely beautifully. [She was] perfect and the audience loved her.”
- | US Tour Operators Association
“Thank you again for your fantastic keynote address. So many guests came to us to share how inspired they were by the Peers Inc. concept, especially the (many!) entrepreneurs in the audience.”
- Sloan Women in Management | Elena Mendez Escobar
“She was spectacular!”
- Worcester Economic Club | Jim Paugh, President
