UA Licenses Collaborative Consumption Technology to Tucson Startup

TUCSON, Ariz. – Anita Bhappu, Ph.D., associate professor at the Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences in the University of Arizona College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, focuses her scholarship on digital retailing, services delivery, workplace diversity and sustainability. Her research has given rise to a new method for engaging employees in the Millennial workplace.

Working with Tech Launch Arizona, the office of the UA that commercializes inventions stemming from University research, Bhappu co-founded Sharing Tribes(link is external) and licensed this intellectual property for the program from the University.

Along with Bhappu, co-founders of the company include Chief Technology Officer William Kasica and Chief Operating Officer David Sebastian.

The team has created a software-as-a-service platform that connects coworkers in a private company marketplace to borrow and lend goods plus volunteer services to help each other. Their mobile application has a familiar and intuitive retail user interface that enhances the coordination of sharing exchanges through scheduling, tracking and notifications.

From lawn mowers to ladders, the idea behind Sharing Tribes is to connect employees across generations and motivate them to build an inclusive coworker community.

The Sharing Tribes tagline is “Buy less. Connect more. Live well.”

Prior to her academic career in consumer sciences, Bhappu worked as a product development engineer for Procter & Gamble. She has an undergraduate degree from the UA College of Engineering in chemical engineering.

Today, Sharing Tribes is taking advantage of TLA’s services and network connections to define and refine their understanding of their customers so as to build a successful go-to-market strategy.

They have engaged with TLA’s business development team and are working with Mentor-in-Residence Kevin McLaughlin. With him as their mentor, they have been accepted into the University’s NSF I-Corps program, a 3-week program that provides teams starting technology companies with coaching and grants of up to $2,250 for customer discovery.

“Sharing Tribes has developed a unique combination of the buying/selling transaction paradigm that we all use with an overarching view towards sharing and social interaction,” he says.

According to McLaughlin, the NSF I-Corps process will be a valuable experience for Sharing Tribes. While their users are co-located employees – who form “tribes” – the buying decision for their software lies with employers.

Sharing Tribes also received business support through another component of Tech Launch Arizona, Tech Parks Arizona (TPA). TPA directs the business incubator, the Arizona Center for Innovation (AzCI). Their intense Mentored Launch program in 2014 laid the foundation for Sharing Tribes’ current business model. The company remains a client of AzCI to access the program’s mentoring and networking opportunities in addition to the TLA business development assistance.

Initially, Bhappu looked to HR executives concerned with employee engagement as their primary customers, but interviews revealed that sustainability and corporate social responsibility executives were also interested in the offering.

“These people understand the business value embodied in our solution,” says Bhappu, “but the funny part is, very few of them think of their employees as consumers; they’ve never thought of collaborative consumption as a strategy to engage employees, even though many of them encourage employees to carpool and rideshare.”

Bhappu and her team have also incorporated a “Buy One, Give One” sales incentive so that socially-responsible companies can sponsor “sharing tribes” in local neighborhoods and schools, expanding access to the platform.

“This works in our favor because when you’re scaling software-as-a-service, the more users you have the cheaper it is to facilitate each transaction,” says Bhappu. “By bringing on more tribes, we can drop the cost of delivering the service.”

Along with connecting people and creating communities around collaborative consumption, the platform offers powerful data analytics, showing how much money and materials people are saving by sharing instead of buying.

“We work hard to provide value for our customers and users,” says Bhappu, “but we also want to build our own corporate reputation on demonstrating the benefits of living more sustainably.”

Photograph: Anita Bhappu, Ph.D., associate professor at the Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences in the University of Arizona College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, demonstrates the Sharing Tribes app. Photo credit: Paul Tumarkin/Tech Launch Arizona.