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About

The problem, mobility is changing fast.

To keep up with new customer demands, technologies and environmental goals, the transport sector is increasingly turning to automation to deliver sustainable, affordable and accessible mobility services. This is transforming labour requirements, demanding new skills and competencies. As a result, mobility stakeholders must be able to understand and prepare for these changes.

WeTransform's solution

Leveraging existing data and people’s expertise, WeTransform will create a cross-national living hub as a knowledge and action platform, offering a path forward for smarter decisions, more innovative and evidence-based policymaking, through accountable and informed governance.

Methodology

Collaboration for innovation is at the heart of the project’s activities. By bringing stakeholders together for in-depth dialogue, WeTransform facilitates progress across the entire mobility sector, creating targeted and transferable solutions.

To understand and respond to the challenges posed by automation on the transport labour force, WeTransform is identifying key barriers, needs, skills, competences, examining best practices and facilitating the co-creation of targeted and durable solutions.

WeTransform adopts a cross-sectoral approach. Addressing changes in labour requirements demands a coordinated response which engages, manufacturers, operators policy makers and unions alike, understanding where priorities are aligned, and where they may diverge. Bringing these groups together, WeTransform achieves just this.

This uses three main approaches:

  • Establish and foster a collaborative platform for the discussion of the effects of automation on transport labour with relevant stakeholders.
  • Co-create user-friendly and shareable knowledge related to automation impacts on transport labour.
  • Enable and support durable and effective dialogue on innovation and the reality of workforce requirements and conditions.

How this will be achieved

Using a living hub, advisory boards and forums, the project will collect and analyse qualitative and quantitative data on labour force automation.

  • The living hub
  • Stakeholder forum
  • Advisory Board
The concept of Living Hub derives from that of Living Lab. At the beginning, living labs were places inside the research laboratories where researchers and ethnographers invited people to observe how they use new information technology. Then, they moved out the research into the real world, creating labs outside the academia and now, they have become innovation platforms to exchange ideas or testbeds where companies test their prototypes with users. Thus, a Living Lab is a “user-centred, open innovation ecosystem, operating in a territorial context, integrating concurrent research and innovation processes with a private-public-people partnership”. The hub includes key stakeholders of all transport modes, researchers, decision makers, trade unions and workers’ associations, gathering knowledge on best practices, challenges and sectoral labour requirements.
The Stakeholder Forum (SF) is a core element of the Living Hub. It is the lever of knowledge-sharing events that activate a meaningful exchange of information and innovation through different actions and activities, from webinars to co-creation workshops. Semi-annual workshops will be organised to gather members of the SF. They will be designed to raise awareness on key topics and set priorities for collaborative research and actions.
High-level experts of transport automation and digital services, from research institutes, academia, public companies, and private business stakeholders, collaborate to target the transnational development of the proposed services and advise on dissemination of outcomes. They will be integrated into the Stakeholder Forum as well.

Partners