Santa is loading up his sledge for the big distribution run on Christmas Eve and his sledge is groaning with "stuff".  But his more forward thinking elves might be feeling a bit insecure as they will have discerned a growing tendency away from us owning physical "stuff".

For some business owners Christmas might afford a welcome break to think more deeply about their business whilst snoozing after The Queen's Speech. Tim Latham, the founder of Unconsultancy says "SME leaders are only too aware of the difficult trading conditions still facing many sectors, and it's enough of a headache fending off existing competition.  But there is a growing army of new start companies, some well funded and resourced, who are planning to eat established players for lunch in 2011."

Unconsultancy works with businesses from pre-startup to the biggest and most established, helping them to understand and redesign their business model for the coming years.  Latham added "One really interesting trend is the move away from owning "stuff" to having access to it when you need it, and at far lower cost - much of it is fairly small scale at the moment, but gathering momentum like a snowball.  Car travel is a good current example, a growing minority are dismissing car ownership and moving to car rental by the hour, picking up and dropping off in a convenient City centre street (for instance Zipcar); or now even peer to peer car rental such as RelayRides or GetAround (whereby I rent you my car for a few hours or a day or so).

The emergence of platforms able to cleverly match excess capacity in something with demand for the same thing elsewhere is driving this new movement and it also chimes with increased environmental concerns and another "R" to add to Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Repair - Redistribute.

Tim gave an example "Apparently the average domestic electric drill is only on and drilling holes for 12 minutes of its entire life, and as every salesperson has had drummed into them - I'm not really interested in the drill, I'm interested in the hole.  People are increasingly less interested in ownership than access to whatever it is when they want it".

So maybe in years to come Santa will be operating less as a distribution service from his central warehouse at the North Pole and more like a redistribution service between all the houses in the world.  A logistical nightmare!