Carsharing Case Study

1614 Words4 Pages

1. Introduction

In recent years, a rapid increase of offers in the field of carsharing is observed. Carsharing is the organized community use of one or more automobiles. It allows unlike conventional car rentals a short time, even minutes-wise rental of an automobile. Already in the 1960s concepts of carsharing in connection with studies on future, computerized traffic control have been originated. The 1980s can be described as a turning point, as several smaller carsharing projects originated for example in Switzerland and in Germany. Since the 1990s, these and other projects such as the City Car Club in UK experienced a significant growth. A study of a consulting agency anticipated a growth to ten billion Euros in the global market for carsharing …show more content…

DriveNow is a joint venture of the automobile manufacturer BMW Group and the car rental company Sixt SE. The carsharing provider was founded in Munich, Germany in 2011 and now offers its services in four other German cities, as well as in London, Vienna, Copenhagen and Stockholm. In 2014, DriveNow was the carsharing operator with most customers in Germany (Book and Fasse, 2014) and had 500,000 customers worldwide for the first time in 2015 (Lilly, 2015). The service has promptly announced an enhanced international expansion. Accordingly, DriveNow wants to start operations in ten North American cities, as well as in up to 15 European cities. In the past, DriveNow was already operating in San Francisco, California until the service had to retreat again due to strict regulations of San Francisco’s municipality (Knauer, …show more content…

In this environment companies must find increasingly new ways to survive and to stand out. According to Paprika (2011), “there are some important organisational trends that can be observed: the need to reduce time-to-market, the need to globalise businesses, and the need to explore both external and internal data continuously and constantly”. Based on these trends, the need to support managers making better business decisions can be emphasised.

Decision making can be defined as an identification process and problem resolution (Draft, 1986). Researchers present three common main phases of the decision making process: the intelligence phase, the conception phase, and the selection phase (Adam, 2012). To understand the relationship of knowledge management to each of these phases, it is firstly important to have a look at three different knowledge management strategies (KMS). These are the Personalization KMS, the Socialization KMS, and the Technological KMS. The Personalization KMS is designed for the emergence of knowledge where the knowledge is closely tied to the individual who developed it (Hansen et al., 1999). The Socialization KMS combines both Technological and Personalization KMS and is designed to exchange and to pool knowledge. Finally, the Technological KMS is designed for

More about Carsharing Case Study

Open Document