Innovation is Good – But We Need a Few Ground Rules to Manage Change
Jonathan Spear
Consultant, Advisor and Technical Writer for Crescar, a Chartered Transport Planning Professional, Fellow of CIHT and CILT and Co-Founder and Past Chair of CIHT UAE.
Technology is changing. Rapidly.
It’s challenging established business models and has profound implications on our everyday lives. It has the power to transform how the economy and society work. But we need a few ground rules to manage this change.
Let’s take “disruptive” technologies. Their advancement is accelerated by the exponential growth of AI, which itself is exhibiting capability breakthroughs on a weekly basis. We now have the potential to radically impact the status quo in multiple ways, shaping our experiences in real time. From analysing sentiment on LinkedIn and using CoPilot or ChatGPT for rapid research, to taking our first ride on electric microtransit vehicles, we’re all futurists now.
Transport Impacts
In the transport sector alone, the emergence of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVS) is the very definition of a true disruptor. With long-term effects on user journey experience, highway design and urban space, automotive and tech firms are engaged in a global arms race to develop fully functional driverless vehicles. They are looking to achieve commercial deployment at scale, shape technical standards and rewrite traffic laws around computers rather than people.
Converging with electric powertrains and shared on-demand models like Mobility as a Service, the future of road transport has never looked as transformational since the invention of the internal combustion engine over a hundred years ago. We therefore live in interesting times. Within a few decades we may wonder how we ever managed without an autonomous electric robotaxi which can be summoned to our door at the click of a smart phone app.
A Practical Lens
However, before we get too carried away, we should exercise a little caution.
Rather than be uncritically beholden to technology, we should select concepts and products based on the benefits they bring to travellers and to society as a whole. We must demand robust evidence that those benefits outweigh the costs, whilst ensuring that the enthusiasm for the latest hype does not compromise or misrepresent safety, security and public value.
Consider, for example, the potential adverse impact of shared, on-demand CAVs on those employed as professional drivers who may need to be reskilled. Or the fact that autonomous driving may expose new vulnerabilities for cybercrime. In fact, while autonomous cars transform personalised mobility, the demands of peak-period commuting may still require focused high-capacity mass transit for which financial sustainability needs to be protected.
To this end, to get the good whilst avoiding the ugly, a few key principles are needed to temper our response to technological change:
- New technology should only be deployed following rigorous validation, with data-driven safety cases and ensuring that all risks have been exhaustively evaluated and mitigated;
- Regulations need to proportionately anticipate and enable change, balancing the interests of industry with those of civil society whilst facilitating and maintaining fair and open standards;
- There should be clear standards on sharing and use of data, which is secure, ethical and protects personal privacy; and finally,
- Entrepreneurs should be allowed to lead within a competitive environment, under an appropriate public sector regulatory framework.
Adherence to these principles will not be easy and will require an open culture of agility, out-of-the-box thinking and cross-sector collaboration, which many organisations, find intimidating, alien or even absurd.
This approach is unlikely to blunt the disruptive nature of many technologies coming forward; and nor should it. The principles above will, however, give us a better chance of shaping the future to the benefit of society, separating real potential from unsupported hype, whilst avoiding overly ambitious or unsubstantiated moonshots which might grab the media headlines, but end up compromising safety and public value.
It is time, therefore, to stop passively following change, get organised and boldly step up to the challenge so that we’re not just responding to technological change, but actively shaping its impact.
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