Barcelona 6 November, MOVE21 hosts White Paper launch event at the Nordic & Baltic Pavilion of the Smart City Expo World Congress, amidst a packed conference programme of MOVE21 mobility, logistics and innovation sessions.
With the project nearing its end in 2025, the MOVE21 consortium took the opportunity to share the project results and lessons learned with a wider public audience at the Smart City Expo World Congress and Tomorrow.Mobility World Congress hosted at Fira Barcelona 5-7 November. This international summit of all things urban sustainability and mobility provided an ideal venue from which to launch the project’s latest White Paper on Public-Private Collaboration in Urban Mobility and Logistics and the key insights from the project contained within.
Delegates scan the download QR code to access the White Paper during the Launch event. (Credits: Rikke Dahl Monsen)
Eight key recommendations for working together
On stage, Project Coordinator Tiina Ruohonen, from the City of Oslo, hosted the launch event with a quick-fire round of the eight key recommendations of the White Paper, as she invited each contributor present in Barcelona to join her on stage and share their favourite recommendation. These eight key recommendations were:
- Promote flexible processes and forms to enable innovation
- Make the model of cooperation simple
- Leverage the technological expertise of private companies
- Use co-creation processes as accelerators
- Engage with local communities in the decision-making process
- Revenue or risk-sharing can be an important success factor
- Go beyond the mobility scope
- Seek out opportunities to enhance innovation capacities
The White Paper itself goes into detail on a range of topics using case studies from within the MOVE21 project of how to implement hubs for logistics and passenger traffic in the real world. These range from Neighbourhood Hubs in Hamburg to Micro-logistics hubs in Bologna and Rome and Mobility Hotels in Gothenburg and Oslo. Using these real-world examples of attempts to implement innovative mobility hub solutions, the authors then share expert advice on the themes of financing and funding (including in the EU-context), risk-sharing and goal attainment, as well as, how to formalise public-private collaborations in order to achieve all of the above.
“Public-private collaboration doesn’t have to be hard, it doesn’t have to be this clunky monster that’s tricky or risky to navigate but it should instead be the logical and preferred way forward to encourage innovation!” Tiina Ruohonen, City of Oslo
Tiina Ruohonen and Suzanne Green discussing their recommendations on stage. (Credits: Rikke Dahl Monsen)
In fact, as rightly pointed out by Suzanne Green of City of Gothenburg, Public-Private collaboration provides an opportunity to really work together across the private, public, academia and civil society sectors. This will help to identify the real needs together and ensure successful implementation with more wide-reaching positive effects than if any one entity had acted alone. In Munich engagement with local communities ultimately ended up creating a hub that also catered to the social needs of the community which in turn reinforced acceptance of the mobility measures being implemented there.
Public-private collaboration, therefore, allows for a more holistic approach to mobility innovation and project implementation. Raffaele Vergnani, Urban Freight Cluster Lead at Polis Network, underlined how the fusing of the the technical expertise of the private sector with the unique testing ground of living cities are key to innovating successfully in the real world. Importantly, revenue and risk sharing can work to ensure success by building accountability and providing assurances to private actors engaged in the collaboration.
“start simple and, as the process develops, then go deeper into the collaboration as it doesn’t work the other way around!” Johan Granberg, RISE
Crucially, when looking to build your own public-private innovation project, it is important to not let perfection become the enemy of good progress. It’s best to start simple and, as the process develops, then go deeper into the collaboration as it doesn’t work the other way around. Geiske Bouma of TNO stated that it’s important to retain flexibility during the lifecycle of a project. Flexible processes can enable reaching longer term objectives and overcoming immediate obstacles to success, even if it means the initial project evolves over time, that’s ok! In the end, no plan survives contact with the real world but, instead, success is achieved by those with the ability to adapt and overcome.
You can access the full White Paper here.