Innovation

The meaning of the term’innovation’ is innovation, change, replacement of the old or, more generally, change. In addition to the idea of improving an existing product or service, the aim is to implement it. However, innovations in companies face a whole series of problems. For affluent societies, companies and their employees avoid risks such as the plague.

The real “innovator’s dilemma” according to Harvard Professor Clayton M. Christensen is that there is an ever-increasing corset of control and safety thinking, especially in companies. The dilemma for innovators is then to have to fight against old vested interests. The innovation results are always assessed according to the old standards. However, one thing is clear: innovations that are safe are basically none.

A successful innovation culture for the mobility industry therefore uses all intellectual and creative resources and is barrier-free. It combines experience and experiments. The experience with more than a hundred years of know-how built up in OEMs, suppliers and planners and implementers in urban administrations. Daimler’s innovation forge Lab1886 has developed its own philosophy for this purpose, which is divided into three successive phases: Ideation, incubation, commercialization.

Innovation is therefore a process based on commonalities, cooperation and exchange. It is important for innovations in the mobility sector to recognise that everything is not just a question of technology. In addition to technical knowledge, this also includes cultural, social and human knowledge. Innovations will only prevail in the long term if the customer is the focus of attention.

“Start-ups enrich the innovative power of large companies and help to bring innovations onto the road.”

Innovation – Recent posts

In the global market environment of mobility providers, product, service, process and entire business model innovations represent a central value driver. Without a positive culture of innovation, there is not only the threat of’out’ in the long term. In addition to promoting creativity, the ideas gained must be planned and implemented as smoothly as possible. Concepts such as Lean Startup help here. Here one relies on independent, entrepreneurial action. Teams propose projects, there are review boards, i.e. a kind of jury, and it is decided quickly and transparently which project should be started.

Agile software engineering then plays the key role in the implementation of the respective idea. No other industry has changed in recent years like the mobility industry to an IT-based industry. The development of modular software, uniform interfaces both to in-house IT and to potential partners (suppliers, customers) and the customer-oriented development of the overall concept allow innovations to be developed in record time today.

Today, startups play an important role in the mobility scene for the development of innovations. An estimated 1,700 startups are working on topics such as technologies for electrification or autonomous vehicles. Startups develop mobility solutions for vehicles, fleets or integrated service concepts. Thanks to an innovative approach, they help above all the big players in the mobility industry, who have massive data stocks but have developed a little bit away from customer needs.

Startups in all vertical technology segments of the automotive industry show how valuable external, smaller, mostly digital teams can be for innovation. Many large OEMs have recognized this: BMW maintains a startup garage, Daimler promotes internal and external startups in its innovation ecosystem Lab1886, there is a Jaguar Landrover Incubator program, Ford and GM have set up Mobility Ventures. And new innovation centers are emerging: the partners Bosch, Daimler, Porsche and BASF (among others) have built up a very powerful innovation promoter in Stuttgart with the startup Autobahn.

On lastmile.zone we will take up the innovation fields of the last mile. In addition to the V presentation of interesting start-ups, we provide first-hand interviews and reports on innovations in passenger and goods transport, urban concepts, infrastructure, services, technologies and the vehicles themselves.

We would be happy to take your ideas with us. You know an exciting startup? Do you have an innovation for improved mobility? Please contact us via our contact form and we will get in touch with you as soon as possible.