Rethinking urban mobility from the data that already exists

Context

Transforming Early Makers is an innovation challenge run by Emlyon Business School. Ours addressed urban mobility, in a team of eight, over three months — from initial framing through to a defence before a jury of professionals and investors.

The subject is broad to the point of being a trap: urban mobility involves pedestrians, cyclists, public transport, road traffic, safety, planning, and a dozen types of stakeholder whose interests only partly align.

Diagnosis

The first instinct on a mobility subject is to produce data: sensors, counts, measurement devices.

The analysis led the other way. The data already exists, in quantity, but it is scattered across public and private actors, heterogeneous in format, and exploited in silos. Local authorities hold their counts, private actors hold their traffic data, each with a partial view of the same territory.

The bottleneck was not collection. It was aggregation — and above all the ability to make data that did not talk to each other produce a decision.

That shift in the diagnosis changed the nature of the project: from an instrumentation project, it became a project about intelligently exploiting multi-source data.

Levers

01 — Aggregate rather than collect

Benefit: a time to market bearing no relation to a hardware rollout, and marginal infrastructure cost.

Design of an urban mobility optimisation solution built on the intelligent aggregation of existing data — pedestrian flows, cyclists, road traffic.

02 — Address three concerns from one foundation

Benefit: widen the set of potential payers without multiplying the build.

The same aggregated data serves safety, mobility fluidity and urban planning. Those three concerns sit with different people inside the same public organisation, which changes how you open a commercial relationship.

03 — Let the field validate before building

Benefit: avoid building a business model on untested assumptions.

Discovery and then validation interviews with public and private actors, notably Métropole de Lyon and HERE Technologies.

Trajectory

Framing and ideation, then discovery interviews, then reformulation of the value proposition based on what the field had contradicted, then construction of the business model, and finally the defence before the jury.

The third step is the one that matters. The interviews did not serve to confirm an intuition — they changed it. The value proposition defended at the end of the project was not the one we started with.

Results

• 3 prizes out of 4 at the challenge
• A value proposition and business model validated with public and private actors in the sector
• A full report and a defence before a jury of professionals and investors

What I took from it

The value of an innovation project lies less in the idea than in its collision with the field. The interviews transformed the value proposition as much as the market analysis did — and they did it faster.

The best diagnosis is often the one that moves the problem. Going from “how do we measure mobility” to “how do we exploit what is already measured” changed the project’s cost, timeline and counterparties in a single decision.

With eight people, arbitration becomes a deliverable in itself. A team that size generates more defensible ideas than it can execute; knowing how to set one aside cleanly matters as much as knowing how to propose one.