Celebrity Speakers - Book inspirational and motivational speakers & entertainers for corporate, association & social events

Rachel Botsman is the co-author of the upcoming book What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption (Harper Collins, September 2010). She is a consultant, writer and speaker on the power of collaboration and sharing through current and emerging peer-to-peer technologies, and how these things can transform the way we live. She is a strategic advisor to OZOlab, a leading innovation lab and business incubator that exists to identify, create, and market a new breed of sustainable businesses with mass consumer appeal.

Rachel, who has lived and worked in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, graduated with a BFA (Hons) from the University of Oxford before undertaking post-graduate studies in leadership and innovation at Harvard University. She has consulted with leaders at the highest levels on branding, innovation and sustainability. Rachel joined Bill Clinton's William J. Clinton Foundation as a senior director, initiating high profile partnerships with The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Nickelodeon, Rachael Ray and the National Basketball Association. She was integral in building The Alliance for a Healthier Generation – a joint venture with the American Heart Association — into a multi-million dollar national program drawing on broad-based support, its mission to create a healthier generation by addressing one of the leading public health threats, childhood obesity, and to reduce its nationwide prevalence by 2015.

Rachel's speeches and writings have appeared in Business Week, Brandchannel, Business21, Shareable and Worldchanging and explore how and why we are moving from old top-heavy, centralised and controlled forms of consumerism towards open systems of sharing, aggregation and social cooperation that are both innovative and scalable.

Rachel Botsman speaks on a variety of topics including collaboration and sharing, P2P (peer to peer) and social networks, innovation, brand and marketing, design, sustainability, future trends, reputation and trust, post-consumerism, and community.



Topic synopses

The Big Shift: Goodbye hyper-consumption, hello collaborative consumption

A 'Big Shift' from the 20th century, a time defined by hyper-consumption, to the 21st century, an age of Collaborative Consumption, is underway. But what is Collaborative Consumption? And who is doing it? What are the new opportunities and implications for your organisation?

In this refreshingly optimistic talk, Rachel travels among entrepreneurs from all around the world, to explain the cultural and economic force of Collaborative Consumption – organized sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping redefined through technology and peer communities – that is reinventing not just what we consume but how we consume. From transportation, to banking, to travel, and daily living, Rachel explains how Collaborative Consumption has the potential to create more sustainable consumerism, reinvent outdated modes of business, and help change the way we live.

Collaborative Thinking: Designing your business for sharing, collaboration and collective action

How can your organisation adapt and be designed to capture the new opportunities for sharing, cooperation and collective wants emerging every day? Through a wide range of global examples and thought-provoking anecdotes, Rachel explores how, in different areas of our lives, web-enabled technologies are moving us away from passive consumption towards interconnected participation and collaboration.

Your Brand Is Now the Community

From mega-brand giants such as Nike, to growing marketplaces such as Etsy, to Web 2.0 giants such as Skype, companies are shifting their core purpose to the communities they serve, not the products or services they sell. In this talk, Rachel explains how collaborative brands are built, managed and spread. Participants learn what it takes to reinvent an established brand and build a new one based on a new era of collaborative dynamics, rules and motivations.

Future Public Services Reimagined

From bike sharing to social lending to neighborhood schemes, an exciting new era of public services are emerging with the potential to transform our cities and make our daily lives better. Rachel will inspire participants with best practices from all around the world that bring to life the role of design, brand, and technological innovation in making these new systems successful, appealing and sustainable. She also explains the role of collaboration and marketing in understanding community motivations and effectively engaging them to rally others to participate.

Making Innovation Happen

There is a giant leap between idea sparks and the self-discipline and productivity required to defy the odds to bring ideas to fruition, time and time again. Rachel provides sticky insights on the specific behaviors and culture required to prevent ideas entering the innovation graveyard. She uses her own experiences successfully driving ideas into reality, from building high-profile public partnerships with former President Clinton, to writing an international selling book, to working with R&D teams all around the world to highlight how organizations can overcome the barriers that get in the way of innovation.

Note: Rachel also offers a full day workshop on the topic that includes tried and tested tools and techniques to generate ideas, run effective creative sessions and become an effective innovation leader. The output of the session includes actionable and relevant ideas the innovation team can drive forward.

The New Reputation and Trust Economy

Reputation capital is becoming so important that it is rapidly emerging as a secondary currency – a currency that claims "you can trust me." In this talk, Rachel uses an array of examples from eBay to peer-to-peer money lending to explain how technology is reinventing old forms of trust and why some reputation systems succeed and others fail; how they motivate good behaviors and discourage bad; and how they can build trust between strangers. She predicts that in the future, your peer 'reputation bank' account will become as powerful as a credit history.

Now that We Can Do Anything What Will We Do?

"Now that we can do anything, what will we do?" is a question that the Creative Industries and innovators face every day. Rachel offers a forecast of the future, exploring the role of design, brand, technology and marketing in influencing the choices consumers make and how these powerful forces can reinvent industries, and transform our daily lives for the better.

Rachel has given speeches to a wide range of audiences including associations, businesses and universities. She tailors each presentation to the needs and size of her audience and is not limited to the topics listed above. These subjects are intended only to suggest her range and interests.