January 18, 2019
A founding team of students and alumni of Jacobs University Bremen and their professor are launching the online platform Sharemac for renting construction machinery at the hanseBAU trade fair in Bremen, Germany.
Whether excavators, wheel loaders or cranes: construction machines are expensive, but often stand around unused in the companies - while on other construction sites these machines are desperately needed. So why not rent them out? This is the basic idea behind the Sharemac platform, which will be launched at the hanseBAU trade fair on 18 January. It was developed by a team of international students from Jacobs University led by Manuel Kimanov and Rezi Chikviladze and accompanied by Sven Voelpel, Professor of Business Administration at Jacobs University.
In one of his seminars at Jacobs University, Voelpel gave his students the task of developing new business models for the sharing economy. Kimanov and Chikviladze found out that companies often use their construction machinery only half the time, and that cranes are standing unused on construction yards 75 percent of the time. The startup now makes this potential available to other construction companies and private users with the online platform Sharemac (www.sharemac.de ).
The advantages of Sharemac are obvious: the lessors achieve an additional source of income, the lessees have a cost-effective rental opportunity, bottlenecks such as a short-term order can easily be overcome. Sven Voelpel, the chairman of the young company which is at home on the campus of Jacobs University, speaks of a "win-win situation".