The perspective of market actors’ on transport transformation

Another focus area for Mistra SAMS phase 2 is understanding what conditions are needed for market actors and entrepreneurs to accelerate the pace of the required transformation toward a climate-neutral and socially just transport system.

As a step towards generatinge these insights, we arranged three business model labs in 2022 to learn the market perspective of shaping Living Lab Riksten. The invited participants were mobility and accessibility service providers active in Stockholm and Mistra SAMS partners.

Discussions about digital platforms, governance and sustainable behaviour

Each business model lab focused on one of three topics: the role of digital platforms, governance that would contribute to sustainable business models, and strategies that would encourage sustainable mobility behaviour in customers. The labs allowed for engaged discussions among the participants, highlighting possibilities, interactions and challenges among the fields.

The participants agreed on several issues one of which was the benefit of there being a publicly-owned digital platform. The participants agreed that such a platform would be best run at the regional level, but should be governed at the national level and co-financed through a private/public partnership. Another item of agreement concerned data and its potential for allowing new enterprises.To develop successful business
models, the market actors agreed that data needs to be open and and sharable in order to provide in-depth knowledge of the needs of both citizens and companies. Another insight was that service providers have taken for granted that people understand the environmental benefits of their services; the workshops made it clear that these provider need to actively encourage sustainable mobility behaviour among their customers and lower the threshold for users to try out new services.

Building an eco-system of sustainable services

Services in semi-suburban areas like Riksten were also discussed during the labs, as well as how public and private actors could work together to build an ‘ecosystem’ for sustainable services in these areas. Here, the participants agreed that a good start would be including input from all types of users and setting targets for utilization rates for all types of services. Having a breadth of input may accordingly lead to collaborations among service providers. To continue to learn from each others’ experiences and to build a stronger ecosystem for current and future collaborations, the next step of Mistra SAMS research is to share the results of Living Lab Riksten with service providers and to hear their views on those results.