Innovations of bike sharing industry in China : A case study of Mobike’s station-less bike sharing system

Abstract: Through over forty-five years of development, bike sharing is not a fangle in Europe. But it becomes a popular topic in China in recent two years. The Chinese startups exert IoT technologies and GPS modular in shared bikes and launched the world’s first station-less bike sharing system. This new bike sharing system gains in popularity and develops dramatically all across China. In addition, the leading bike sharing service providers such as Mobike, got over $300 million investment since the start of 2017, which caught the attention of the public. More and more venture capitalists want to touch this new tempting pie. This paper mainly focuses on investigating what are the roles of this new bike sharing system in urban mobility in China especially in Shanghai and its influences in the society. Meanwhile, the socio-technological innovations of the new bike sharing are explored together with the application of different theoretical frameworks, such as Porter’s Five Forces and system thinking. This paper also tempted to fill up the gap in the literature that describing the missing part of smart bike sharing business - using the station less bike sharing business model, involving a discussion of its pros and cons. In order to give more detailed insights about the new bike sharing industry, we choose the world’s first station-less bike sharing service company - Mobike, as our case study object to investigate the revolutionary bike sharing system in Chinese major cities, specifically in Shanghai - the representative megacity of China. Conclusions and future development suggestions are provided at the end of this paper so that the stakeholders could have some references for further development of bike sharing industry.