The internet has enabled companies to leverage excess capacity and their customers to unlock massive scale and exponential growth, according to the co-founder of Zipcar.

Shared networked assets always deliver more value than proprietary assets closed off through patents or trademark laws, with the benefits of sharing always outweighing the risks, Robin Chase told more than 500 people Wednesday at the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) 2015 Summit in Providence, R.I.

"You can't solve exponential problems with linear solutions," said Chase, who also founded French peer-to-peer car sharing service Buzzcar in 2011. "But by leveraging excess capacity, we can defy the laws of physics."

The internet has paved the way for a collaborative economy where more networked minds are considered better than fewer proprietary minds, Chase said, with businesses consistently experimenting, iterating, evolving and adjusting. 

Chase poured cold water on large-scale projects that depend on building infrastructure from scratch, saying this approach often requires a decade of investment before any relief is felt. 

"We need to do things right here, right now with the stuff we've got this minute," Chase said. 

That's what Chase did in 2000, when she realized that personal cars sit idle 95 percent of the time and cost $9,000 a year to own, insure and maintain. Similarly, rental cars at the time had to be consumed in 24-hour increments even if the customer only needed a car for two hours or 26 hours, she said.

"You were forced to buy more than you wanted," said Chase, who, with Zipcar, changed the economics of driving by ripping out excess capacity.

There are three ways to extract more value from excess capacity, Chase said: slice it into little pieces like Zipcar; aggregate all the parts together like Airbnb; or create something entirely new and more valuable through open data.

Zipcar succeeded by marrying the large investment, standards and consistency of large business – which Chase said took the form of a platform – with the localization, customization, innovation, creativity and redundancy that only individuals can provide. And the internet has made it inexpensive for companies to work with lots of customers at once.