The Frankenstein Monster Syndrome: What holds sustainable Mobility as a Service from surviving in the open market

Abstract

Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is a personalised, one-stop travel management platform, which digitally unifies trip purchase and delivery across all transport modes. MaaS promises to reduce the environmental impact of personal mobility, however most of its exemplars are “hopeful monstrosities,” small scale demonstrator projects established in protected strategic niches or “living labs.” Few MaaS offerings survive in the open market, a phenomenon that this paper dubs the Frankenstein monster syndrome. The paper claims that in addition to ordinary market pressures, MaaS experiments, supported by networks of providers, academia, policy makers and not-for-profit organizations, find it difficult to integrate in larger scale networks in the “real world.”The paper reports research on this phenomenon through the lens of the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing group interaction approach, which offers analytical framework to investigate how MaaS providers may reproduce the experimental networks they based their pilot offering on larger scale. The research draws on data from nineteen interviews with stakeholders to MaaS offerings. The findings suggest that the challenges to establish networks include hard to establish trust, asymmetry of relationships and conflicting interests, and that Government intervention is indispensable to establish MaaS networks.