Leveraging the Power of Sharing: The Case of a Social Enterprise at the Base of the Pyramid

Abstract

The sharing economy has been predominantly studied in developed country contexts and hence we do not understand it in the base of the pyramid (BoP) context. Considering the unique characteristics of the BoP context, it is worthwhile to explore how sharing economy can be leveraged in such a context. Specifically, we studied the case of a social enterprise operating in India and tried to understand how the organization adopted the sharing economy model for addressing its resource challenges. We found that while faced with the resource challenges of finance, human resource, and knowledge resource, the organization used different sharing such as digital platform sharing, human resource sharing, channel sharing, knowledge sharing, and business model sharing. Our study has important implications for the literature on sharing economy and social entrepreneurship.