General Assessment: Is Innovation being Leashed?

The slightly modified title (Un/Leashing) reflects the prevailing paradigm underlined at several occasions during the Leipzig 2010 Forum. Transport innovations can have both the public and private sectors as promoters of innovative practices, but on occasions, more common on the public side, they can act as impediments to innovation, willingly (through regulations) or unwillingly (through unintended consequences). In light of many converging challenges such as urbanization, globalization, environmental constraints, the financial crisis, and energy, every segments of the transport system, from operators, regulators, owners to users are facing pressures to innovate; to unleash the potential of innovation. The rationale is straightforward. Economic history clearly underlines that innovations are linked with new opportunities, that they are a vector for productivity, but that they also come with risks and unintended consequences. Any perusing of periodical such as “Popular Mechanic”, particularly the 1930-1960 era, indicates that in spite of the hype, technological and market failures abound. New ideas rarely become mainstream. While it is well known that more than 90% of all commercial products and services introduced on the market eventually fail, such a failure rate is unacceptable in the transport system, mostly because of its capital and infrastructure intensiveness. Mistakes would simply be too costly. This is one major reason why many segments of the transport system are reluctant to adopt innovation.