If you’re thinking about innovation, you’re surely also thinking about business model innovation. Robin Chase, the co-founder of Zipcar, has much to say on this essential topic in her recently published volume, Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism. The book, with its clear prose style and lively approach to thinking about business models, is a terrific read — but what truly impressed me about Chase was her willingness to talk, on Twitter, about the volume. Those all-too-fast conversations were soon expanded, when we jumped platforms to Google Docs to create the dialogue below. It turned out to be a terrific platform for talking Peers Inc, which is, in many ways, about platforms and the use we make of them.

The phrase “collaborative economy” is your preferred term in Peers Inc. It’s interesting that the formulation “the ____ economy” is so welcomed by the business media, and by the culture in general. Many people felt the “new economy” failed to deliver on its grand promises, and one suspected that such constructions would be avoided for some time to come. This is clearly not the case. People are talking constantly about the sharing economy, the gig economy, and (of course) the collaborative economy. Can you account for the staying power of this formula? Why must we qualify the word “economy”? And what is the emotional valence of a word like “collaborative”? Have you received much feedback about it from readers? Did you, by any chance, test it as you were writing the book? If you’ve got data, I’d love to hear about it…

Robin Chase: You’ve immediately hit on an important issue. I know for sure that words matter, because they are the very important way that people receive new ideas. I sometimes say that “marketing is everything” (when I’m not saying that “transportation is everything,” or “climate change is everything”). No matter how much affection I might have for a word, based on whatever logic I’ve decided is best, what matters more than what I think, is how it a word or sentence is understood by everyone else. And meaning can change over time, and especially can change when lots of money (or repetitive exposure) is put behind it.

Right now, the term “sharing economy” is synonymous with Airbnb, Uber, and TaskRabbit. People hear the phrase and think of P2P transactions on a marketplace platform, where money is exchanged. In the book, I show how this envisioned sharing economy is just one subset of a much larger movement.

I did think a lot about what was the right word. Way back in 2008 I came up with the term “cooperative capitalism.” But today I want to go broader still. The word “cooperation” gives the impression that we have to cooperate, but we don’t! These platforms do the cooperating so that people don’t have to. And the word “capitalism” implies that all transactions that take on the Peers Inc structure all have to do with money and markets. But they don’t. There are so many platforms that are free, and many that are not just P2P, but also P2B, or person to government, or business to government!

It was in talking with Seth Godin and Antonin Leonard that I began to think about using the term “collaborative.” I just wanted to get away from the preconceptions that went with the word “sharing” and open it back up into something broader and as yet unknown. To leave space for a new understanding of what this might be.

The word “economy” incorporates the whole system and also doesn’t pick an ideology. I also think that people have deep concerns about the foundation and longevity of capitalism. These concerns aren’t overt, but in the background. The word “economy” incorporates employment and income and resource use as well as the business enterprise side of things.

I’m curious about what the collaborative economy will do for independent professionals: designers, programmers, writers. As a former freelance journalist, I know the massive difficulties faced by those who seek to assemble a living from various gigs, and worry that many of them just don’t truly understand of the difficulty of making a living in the Peers Inc universe. (As the media grows more and more dependent on crowd-sourced material, it becomes more and more difficult to get paid well for one’s writing.) You seem to understand this, and suggest that the government step in here. As you write in your recent HBR article, “Who Benefits from the Peer-to-Peer Economy?”: “Local and federal governments need to start tying benefits to people and not jobs, ensuring that labor is protected during this disruptive and swift transition.” The fact is, the Peers Inc paradigm is always tilted towards the Inc (the orgs with the resources to create our collaborative platforms) and away from the Peers (those who use them in various, sometimes innovative and idiosyncratic and personal, ways). Question is: How much intervention is necessary, and what kind of intervention would you recommend, to ensure that this collaboration skews toward the humane?

RC: The desire of companies to minimize their expenses and avoid paying taxes is a fact of life around the world. Witness recently lost lawsuits brought against Walmart and FedEx for inappropriately categorizing workers as independent contractors or fixing hours to keep workers part-time. Workers are being ever more productive while compensation has stagnated since the 1970s.

As I wrote in Peers Inc: “It’s essential that we bring economies back to a more sustainable distribution of productivity gains. In economist Thomas Piketty’s 2014 best-selling Capital in the 21st Century, his analysis found that the top 10 percent of Americans in 2010 owned 70 percent of the capital, trending toward the extreme capital inequality last observed in 1910 monarchical Europe.” The Peers Inc structure will result in even more productivity gains. More work will be organized this way.

So what’s a government to do? The Obama administration has been quietly working on workplace reform. Recently, the National Labor Relations Board put through a ruling that makes it possible for those employed as contractors or by franchisees to be able to enter into collective bargaining agreements. This will help in some situations, but not all.

I think we need to create a new third category of work that is neither W2 nor 1099. Workers in this new economy will be doing many jobs at the same time, flowing in and out of different income-generating efforts. This is not the same as being a full-time worker, nor a freelancer doing just one job on contract for several months. This new category of work should be eligible for all the workplace regulations that currently protect full-time workers.

Additionally, we need to make it simple for these individuals to pay taxes, as well as get health benefits. Ideally, we should have a national health care system that supports everyone, regardless of his or her work status in any particular month.

Where do I think we need to go? Ultimately, we need to take the productivity gains that Peers Inc platforms afford and translate this new wealth into a universal Basic Income, universal free health care, and young childcare. These social safety nets and minimum living standards should underpin every citizen’s life. They can then find work that provides them with additional income that fills them with passion, and gives meaning to their lives. From a social standpoint, I honestly believe this will deliver us the most creative and resource-efficient future, while rewarding hard work and innovation. The smart and ingenious can still get rich! And by sharing a fraction of those productivity gains with everyone. We will all live in a world that is safer, cleaner, kinder and more creative.

Would like to hear more about how the degree of platform complexity influences innovation. In a walled garden model, there’s only so much variation available — but in an open platform, the communal imagination can run wild. We have all seen the variety of stuff, good and bad, that, say, YouTube has produced, but I’m interested in new and unusual platforms, and the new and unusual innovations they’ve produced. My latest favorite is the fascinating crowdsourced variety show, HitRECord on TV. This is an intriguing Peers Inc concept, as applied to the entertainment business, in which movie star Joseph Gordon-Levitt (the Inc) collaborates with, well, anyone who has an idea that catches his fancy (the Peers). Take a glance at the first episode, and you’ll quickly see how it embodies the idea of harnessing the audience’s excess capacity for talent. (BTW: it’s fascinating to read the contract that participants must sign, regarding monetizing their communal IP.) So: (1) What’s your reaction to HitRECORD on TV, and (2) what new platforms that have caught your expert eye?

RC: HitRECord is absolutely a wonderful and fascinating Peers Inc incarnation. What caught my notice is that, while people can collaborate with other artists on anything uploaded, it appears that the vast majority of collaboration is done on very specific bite-sized projects the HitRECord staff proposes. This points out the careful balance required to elicit participation: the right amount of freedom and the right amount of constraint.

As to other cool Peers Inc uses, I’m particularly interested in ones that lead to empowerment and change. Stephen Johnson’s book, Future Perfect, talks about how democracy can be transformed into a whole range of ways to incite “participatory democracy.” In my own city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the city set aside $600,000 for residents to decide how to spend. And the Personal Democracy Forum, and their Civic Hall, have lots of examples of how democracy is being evolved with the use of new platforms.

I’m also totally intrigued by Tom Cosgrove’s work with WikiWisdom, which allows for better communication between the bottom of a large bureaucracy up to the top.

How Peers Inc is being used to address climate is the area in which I most want to see new innovation. I am a huge admirer of 350.org and how they’ve used their platform to empower and aggregate hyper-local actions into a very big movement. And, in another way and on another scale, Global Forest Watch should have a big impact on the very local problem of deforestation. Watch GFW’s great video explaining the Peers Inc collaboration.

Finally, a design question. As you’re someone who has extensively studied platforms, and created a successful platform yourself with Zipcar, can you point to the key design elements a platform needs to have in order to be successful?

RC: Is there a one size that fits all? I’d say no. So many kinds of people and markets and needs. I guess you have to start with key design values of simplicity and clarity. The starting small and getting it in front of users fast to learn, iterate, and improve. A watchful two-way street of platform builders pushing in one direction and feeling how the peers respond. It is truly an evolutionary process.

Ken Gordon is the Content, Conversation, and Community Strategist at Continuum, the global innovation design consultancy, where he thinks about things such as empathy fatigue and Jerry Seinfeld’s ideas on hipster service.