Innovative transport solutions — Unravelling challenges in public-private networks

Licentiate thesis, 2022

New transport solutions and technologies are continuously developed and implemented aiming to reduce emissions, increase road safety, and improve mobility for both people and goods. Solutions with high potential for increased sustainability often depend on multi-actor interaction and public-private collaborations. However, even if the solutions or technologies are considered to have high potential to contribute to sustainable transport systems, they are rarely implemented on a large scale. This thesis aims to contribute to current understanding of challenges of implementing innovative transport solutions that depend on interactions between public and private actors.

The thesis builds upon a qualitative research design based on three studies, a literature review and two empirical studies, exploring three different transport solutions, UCC, MaaS, and geofencing, in their network contexts. The studies focus on challenges of achieving the transport solutions’ expected sustainability objectives, network and role dynamics in developing and implementing the solutions, and the perceived value of and barriers to the solutions.

The results of the studies identify three sets of challenges: (1) the challenge of reaching sustainability objectives for innovative transport solutions, (2) the challenge of understanding networks and actor roles in innovative transport solutions, and (3) the challenges with resource interaction and combination for innovative transport solutions. To achieve the desired sustainability effects, better coordination is required within and between organizations and between different developing areas. Understanding of actor roles in implementing new transport solutions needs to be further elaborated. New types of innovation processes could be relevant to achieving the expected sustainability objectives of new transport solutions more efficiently.