Mapping sharing economy in Brazil: A typological configurational study about business models of Brazilian companies

Abstract

Sharing economy has emerged in the last years as a disruptive approach to the traditional way of planning, modeling and making business between companies and people. This phenomenon earned a significant leverage in a wide gamma of domains, including entrepreneurship, innovation, technology and management in its widest ways. Although this trend and interest, academic and marketwise speaking, there’s a lack of a deepest research of its different views, such as ontology, technological facilitators, social boosters (consuming behavior) and mainly in the rising diversity of business models in shared economy and its implications to business growth, community impact, sustainability and public politics. Most part of the existing researches are concentrated in the international scope. On the other hand, the subject is still very immature in Brazil, reflecting itself in shallow researches. Thus, this research aims to leverage a rigorous comparative methodology, the fs/QCA (Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis), to evaluate business models from 12 Brazilian companies inserted in the sharing economy in Brazil. Taking advantage of a rich set of qualitative data extracted from existing researches and other publications, this research investigates the attributes of business models in the sharing economy, revealing by the end a unique typological configuration that represents the constellation of business models of the companies within Brazil’s sharing economy business scope. Emerging dilemmas and paradoxes are explored, as well as the implications of business models for startups, researches e other interested parties in the context of sharing economy in both national and international scope.