The notion of renting, sharing or leveraging assets—as opposed to owning them—has taken many forms throughout history. In the business world, leasing everything from buildings to machinery has been used as a common practice to shift assets from the balance sheet. And while not owning assets has been standard practice for heavy machinery and non-mission-critical functions (e.g., copiers) for decades, recently there’s been an accelerating trend towards outsourcing even mission-critical assets.
