New principles for new economic activities. Among sustainable growth, peer–to–peer collaboration and digital innovations

Digital technology is starting to play an increasingly vital and fundamental role in the creation and development of new business models which, exactly thanks to this tool, are able to find new market spaces and interesting growth prospects both in innovative and in traditional fields, but also creating a deep change in this new paradigma. This current transformation is mainly influenced by two factors: a) technology’s ability to change society, people’s life, business’models; b) a very important economic and financial shortage of resources, depending from crisis. This imposes difficult decisions towards the change. In fact, to react to the impoverishment due to the crisis and to the lack of trust in the economic and financial system, new enterprises are now developing, based on a different and innovative idea of consumption, more focused on and aware of everyone’s real needs. This new idea considers not only the strictly economic but also the equally relevant social,environmental and personal aspects of a certain activity. This involves a deep economic and social transformation.The so called sharing economy aims at providing concrete and useful alternatives to traditional business activities, creating structures that link all operators/users to obtain savings in terms of time, money, higher efficiency, reliability of things produced and used, economicsu stainability and creation of new wealth. These new business models don’t have a specific regulation, so the operators are working taking advantage of the gaps in ordinary regulation, and of the slow pace existing rules are updated. This has happened in spite of the fact that the more widespread use of these models causes uncertainty and a certain mistrust, especially in those whodon’t always use information technology tools. In the international debate about if it’s necessary a specific regulation or, on the contrary, if it’s appropriate maintaining some spontaneity, European Union is taking action to adopt general guidelines about Sharing Economy and to evaluate possible perspectives for an appropriate law intervention.