Ready to play in the new mobility co-opetition game?
This article represents solely the private opinion of the author and not the opinion of any related or quoted organization.
Fully autonomous vehicles, robo-taxi and robo-shuttles…
After having a hell of a party with usually trustworthy traditional players and the new kids on the block outbidding each other with announcements and promises they couldn’t keep…
…after going through the subsequent AV “hangover” period, realizing that there is much more to getting technology, regulation, and the consumer mind to the required maturity to operate self-driving cars on open roads, pivoting and initiating the necessary internal changes across organizations…
…we are finally arriving in the third stage where players realize that we are solving a systemic issue, and the only way to do that is by co-opetition.
Co-opetition has recently become my favorite buzz word when it comes to talking about Future of Mobility. What does it mean to me? It means to collaborate on pre-competitive elements which everybody needs, but nobody wins by developing in silos. Think testing and validation standards. Think culture shift and public acceptance. Think liability laws and ethical standards. Think developing a middleware to translate algorithm code coming from different sensor setups. But maybe also think HD maps, mobility data sharing protocols, or even sensor fusion and perception algorithms. At the same time, to compete on the real differentiating factors which can be both on the technology as well as on the business model side.
We have seen the purest form of co-opetition evolving profoundly in partnerships. One of the recent announcements has been the collaboration of Daimler and BMW on autonomous vehicles, having made the first experiences of working together with once the fiercest competitor on mobility services along the Now-Family. What is happening here is the realization that
a) the competitive advantage of brand and providing an exceptional driving experience just doesn’t work the same way in the new games of mobility services or design of autonomous tech and
b) joining forces can help to capture a bigger share of the pie at a lower cost.
The bilateral and trilateral agreements are leading to a deep web of relationships in which everybody is being connected to everybody (see e.g., firstmile.de analysis of Toyota below). The key advantages of bilateral partnerships are a high degree of control, more straightforward governance, and, therefore, faster execution. The potential risks are for the organizations not to choose the right partner (“sorry boss, every other partner was already taken by our competitors”); and for the society and mobility system as a whole the risk to develop competing standards which slow down the overall progress and adoption of the new mobility models.
Enter the non-led collaboration platform model — partners represented with respective voting rights on a governing body to make decisions. This model is especially suitable for developing successful assets and models with equal business interests among multi-sector stakeholders. Partners are sharing the cost and risk of development efforts for non-differentiating elements while remaining competitive on what they do best — e.g., the customer experience, vehicle design, service pricing, etc. There are, however, two interdependent vital reasons why many collaborations failed in the past — complex and slow decision-making and lack of trust. The delayed decision making and execution issues result partly from trust issues, partly from the incompatibility of the processes, objectives, and role models of the participating organizations. This model is highly applicable to develop and validate proposals for standardization and legislation in mobility — the final decision has to be met by the regulator or a single standard-setting body.
As for the trust issue among the players, but also from the consumer perspective, ask yourself a simple question — would you trust a tech company to run mobility in your city? The concentration of power which comes from dominant platforms has been a significant roadblock on accelerating innovation in mobility. The issue cries for an independent third party (in the best case certified by the regulator), which doesn’t have a vested interest in e.g., running the Mobility Operating System, can facilitate the process and secure customized data access between the consortium players in a neutral and safe way. Which organizations are suitable to play this role is highly dependent on the geopolitical context of deployment; however, experiences in data assurance and auditing practices can be of significant advantage. The role of a “Mobility Accountant” is what expert and executive participants in multi-sector multi-stakeholder Future of Mobility Labs we’ve been hosting across the globe for the past three years repeatedly suggest.
No matter which collaboration form is chosen to solve a mobility problem at hand, one particular requirement is persistent — the need for next-generation data governance. A Deloitte study comes to a conclusion “when processing large data sets, unstructured data, or low latency data, it becomes more difficult to understand the context, importance, and associations of data, and thus to ensure the data’s reliability and security. Without a shift in data governance mindsets, [organizations] will likely find it challenging to leverage all the business benefits of next-generation platforms and successfully manage risks.” The study outlines the particular principles along four pillars that are applicable beyond mobility models when it comes to big data management and data collaborations.
Finally, as outlined in the article “Collaboration Matters” back in 2017, there is an ever-evolving need to share learnings and data between mobility pilots and deployments across the globe. The orchestrated exchange between cities and players should feed into a collaborative design of a global policy frameworks and establishment of agile standards to make mobility more inclusive, more safe, more efficient and ecologically viable across the world.
Game on!

This article has been also published on LinkedIn
