Mobility Innovators

Jaspal Singh [00:04]:

Welcome to the mobility innovators podcast.

Jaspal Singh [00:10]:

Hello, everyone. I’m so happy to welcome all listeners from around the world to the mobility innovators podcast. I’m your host – Jaspal Singh. Mobility Innovators Podcast invites key innovators in the transportation and logistics sector to share their thoughts about the key changes in the sector about their work and what is their forecast for the future.

I am very excited about my conversation with the special guest today, as we will be discussing Open Innovation. Our today guest is an amazing corporate innovator. He started his journey as a marketing communication specialist, but with his talent and grit became Head of Open Innovation at Transport for London TfL. Innovation is in the DNA of TfL and the agency was completing more than 30 million journeys every day before the pandemic.

He is leading open innovation activity at TfL, promoting public and private sector collaboration to utilize cost savings, increased revenue, deliver policy outcomes faster and drive more engagement. He is also a guest lecturer at the University of Oxford and Royal College of Art, teaching and discussing practical applications in open innovation.

He’s my mentor, and one of my favorite people in the public transport space. I’m so happy to welcome Rikesh Shah, Head of Open Innovation, Transport for London. It’s now time to listen and learn.

Hello Rikesh, thank you so much for joining us on this show. I’m really looking forward to our conversation today.

Rikesh Shah [01:31]:

Thank you. Thanks for having me just now.

Jaspal Singh [01:34]:

So today I’ll be spending time getting to know more about you, your current role and your thoughts on the innovation in the mobility sector.

And to begin with, I would like to ask you to share a little more about yourself with our listeners, and also, are there any interesting facts about your career that are not on LinkedIn?

Rikesh Shah [01:51]:

Thank you, Jaspal. So I’m the Head of Open Innovation at Transport for London, and I’ve been at Transport for London now for 21 years, and I’ve done a wide range of roles at Transport for London, you know, from roles in digital tech, digital partnerships, to marketing and a wide range of other things. So being at Transport for London for 21 years has given me a great opportunity to try different things.

Secondly, that I have transport in my family. So my father worked for TfL prior organizations for 38 years. So as a result, you know, combined, we we’ve really nearly done 60 years together. So transport has genuinely been in the blood.

Jaspal Singh [02:37]:

So it’s a 60 years of transportation experience in the family. That’s great.

Rikesh Shah [02:42]:

Yeah, it’s good discussions around the dinner table

Jaspal Singh [02:45]:

I’m pretty sure, you know, comparing how it was in the past and how it has looked like.

So now my second question is, you earned your bachelor’s in economics and social policy, and you did your master’s in marketing management. And then, and like you mentioned, after that started your career with Transport for London as a Marketing Communication Specialist, but the major change happened in your professional journey when you join as a Senior Manager of Digital Partnership and Open Data in 2014 and became Head of Innovation in 2017.

So I’m curious to know about the journey from Marketing Expert to a Corporate Innovator. And how did you convince internally to set up an innovation hub? Would you like to share some interesting experience during this journey?

Rikesh Shah [03:26]:

Yeah, sure. I think an important element, a milestone in my career was doing the social policy and the public policy side of things. And that really gave me an understanding of creating social value and, the importance of creating social value, where you create a society that’s, that’s focused on equity, that’s accessible. And you think about some of the positive things that a government agency does, and also how it protects us from some of the address impacts that the society needs to be protected from. So I think I really enjoyed that some of the conversations around public policy and, social value. And then I think starting, you know, my first role in marketing and doing my masters in marketing whilst I was at Transport for London really gave me a focus on the importance of the customer and the customer is the most important thing and the most important element of any organization.

Rikesh Shah [04:23]:

And in our case, you know, when we ask customers what they want, they broadly want three things. Now, firstly, we need to make sure that every journey that we provide is reliable, it’s safe, etc. Yeah. And without that, that’s a basic requirement. We have to get that right linked to that. Customers want value for money. They want to make sure that when they’re making that journey, they feel they’ve got value. And finally, what our customers are saying is they want us to be more progressive and to be more innovative. Yeah. So what I really realized, what we’re doing the first role in marketing and focus in marketing is really understanding the role of the customer. Really sort of thinking about the end to end experience, think about the context of mobility in a large city, start thinking about integration. When someone in the morning walks, they may then get to their bus stop, they then use a bus.

Rikesh Shah [05:19]:

Then they use the tube network, and they might use other forms of modes. So really what’s set into end user journey. And where are the customer satisfaction elements within that? And how do we continuously drive more customer satisfaction? So in particular, sustainable forms of transport becomes the mode of modes of choice. So that, that was certainly one of my first couple of learnings in my career. And then I think there were a couple of significant milestones. I was really fortunate to work on the open data program and digital partnerships program, where we were working with three different tiers of partners. You know, one was very much the tier one platform owners, the Apple Maps, the Google Maps, Twitter, many others, Amazon Web Services. We were then working with some of the niche app providers like bus times and series of other transport related products.

Rikesh Shah [06:14]:

And then thirdly, we were working with some of the academic institutes, some of the operational sort of specialists, transport planners, who are using our data. And what we found is by releasing this data, you can form some incredible partnerships. At one stage, we had 17,000 registered users of our open data. These were 17,000 brains that were helping to solve some of our problems. And at that time, 42% of Londoners were using an app powered by TfL data. So we’re engaging to the earlier point, we’re engaging with the customer through their channel of choice. So they were getting lots of good information. And we’re also getting data back from the likes of ways and others around how we can run our operations more effectively. So answering your question of how do we that move to the innovation hub, or if we could solve problems jointly by co-developing solutions with the market, particularly on open data partnerships.

Rikesh Shah [07:15]:

Well surely, we could do more of that way of working in terms of just open innovation, where we’re much better at defining our problems. We’re much better at co-developing solutions by providing subject matter expertise and data, and then trialing some of the solutions. So I think that’s where we found that big change. And, and it wasn’t just a change in terms of how TfL deals with the market, but it was also a change in terms of how we set ourselves up as an organization where you bring in HR, colleagues, engineering, colleagues, tech, and data colleagues, commercial colleagues, innovation colleagues, altogether to say, what’s the problem that we’re trying to solve here. Can we take our badges off? Can we focus on this problem that we’re trying to solve? And let’s really think about how do we work with the market? How do we test and develop an MVP, a minimum viable product? How do we iterate it? And how do we genuinely get to a stage to say, is this concept, this product that we’re trialing for, and is it working and can it create a business case? And if it doesn’t, let’s fail, let’s learn from it quickly. But if it does well, then let’s develop a business case. So really fascinating journey and really interesting to do that in a, in a public sector organization.

Jaspal Singh [08:28]:

Well thank you for sharing. You mentioned some of the great point and I think it’s not valued only for transportation or public transport agencies. It’s valued for all the company, putting the customer at the center and try to identify whether this solution will solve the problem which customer face, or it’s just adding up one more layer of complexity for the customer to find the detail. So these are great point. Thank you for sharing that.

And in fact, my next question is linked with what you have partially answered is that public orations are not designed for innovation and change and especially the public transport organization, and TfL is very different as it’s credited with some of the best, world’s first project, including world first underground line, traffic signaling systems, smart ticketing, open data policy, which you just mentioned. So can you share brief overview of open innovation department within TfL? Who are your clients, and also what does automation structure look like? The number of employees on the level and key role within this department?

Rikesh Shah [09:26]:

Yep. So I think what’s really important is before you even going to the detail, what the function does is what’s the strategic purpose of the organization. So in our case, we look to the Mayor’s Transport Strategy to give us the guidance and the Mayor’s Transport Strategy sets out that about 80% of trips in London will be made by walking, cycling in public transport or transit by 2041. Yeah. So that gives us a very clear focus. And then the open innovation team then starts thinking about what does this actually mean when we start going into the Mayor’s Transport Strategy? So, you know, a key pillar of the mayor’s transport strategy is about a healthier London. So that means that how do we ensure that the air that people are breathing isn’t polluted and doesn’t help generate respiratory diseases, or at least we tackle to tackle that, how do we encourage people to be more active by reducing type two diabetes and obesity in our city?

Rikesh Shah [10:27]:

How do we reduce the tragedies around road safety, where we had 96 deaths in 2020 and we get it to zero and we won’t stop until we get it to zero. Yeah. How do we continuously provide a good public transport experience? And thinking about what innovations we can bring in that domain. And finally, the role of transport is much more than just moving people from A to B, it’s about thinking about just creating economic hubs, creating more housing and creating a sense of community and, creating a transport network that’s for. So as soon as we start thinking about all of that, you start coming into particular problems and challenges that city’s facing and not all of them can be solved in a traditional approach. And that’s where innovation comes in to say, with advances in technology, how do we in the innovation have to help do that?

Rikesh Shah [11:21]:

So answering one of your questions, who are our clients? TfL is a large organization. We have 27,000 people and that’s direct employees. If we start thinking about indirect employees for our franchisees, that would be hundreds of thousands, 20,000+ bus drivers, etc. So what’s really important is to start really framing the question of where are the big challenges that we have and how can the open innovation team add most value? So we are constantly engaging with the head of the tube network, the head of the bus network, the head of the roads network, also some of the eternal support services and really thinking of them as our partners. And we really working with them to say, how can we help you solve your problems? Not only to develop nice proof of concepts, but business cases that are scaled and is really scary.

Rikesh Shah [12:17]:

You realize some of the benefits and some of the benefits may be realize in the short term, some of the benefits may be realizing the slightly longer term. And what we do within the open innovation team is we have a series of specialists. And some of this one part of the team focuses on Design Thinking and Problem Solving, really understanding the right problem. Because sometimes large corporates can get a bit worried about failure and can get worried about risk. So what’s really important here is we really understand the right problem that we’re trying to solve. And we work closely with the business area to define the right problem statement in the right context. Because somewhere like London, it’s a complicated setup. You’ve got legacy systems. You’ve got multiple systems. If it’s a data or a tech related program, you’ve got different forms of transport overlapping with each other, you know, below ground, you have different fiber, you have tunnels, you have water utilities, lots of people.

Rikesh Shah [13:16]:

So it’s not Greenfield site. So starting to put all of that context together, how do we define the right problem in the right context? Secondly, how do we run the experiments, the pilots? And even before we do that, how do we ensure we’re focusing on the high value ones? Yeah. How do you focus on the right conditions? The business area, the sponsor will be really interested. They’ll provide the right assets, access to the assets, the right people. And then we’re also realizing that more people want to the market wants to work with us. So how do we set up the right conditions to work closely with the market, to scout the market where the market might want to invest in some R&D with us, and the most relevant as a public body is if you’re working with the market, you need to be open and transparent. So how do you make sure the right procurement processes in the right culture and, suddenly the open innovation team is acting as a center of excellence to help the organization scale. In some instances, we get very involved end to end. In other instances, it’s much more of a light touch. So we don’t want to get in the way of good innovation in the organization. Our role is to provide the air cover where needed, but also to help promote all the good innovation that’s taking place across the organization or with our supply chain.

Jaspal Singh [14:31]:

Thank you for sharing all these points. I mean, these are great points and, I really love what you mentioned about understanding the problem. And I think there was a quote would say that if you understand the problem, clearly you solve 80%. So, rest 20% is just understanding the solution. But first thing is to understand the problem, which a lot of people don’t do, and understanding the business case is very important because a lot of time we do innovation, but we don’t have a business case. And that’s what happening in the market right now. We see a lot of startups are going out of business because they don’t have a real business case. This is remarkable, what you just mentioned. Thank you for that. In fact, my next question is also linked with what you just touch upon about the public procurement.

Jaspal Singh [15:16]:

And I actually surveyed 40 transport authorities and operator across the globe. And all of them are keen to embrace innovation work with startup and industry, but they mentioned one important point and they said they don’t know how to fulfill the public procurement requirement or public procurement rules. And I would say TfL is one of the agency, which managed to decode this. A lot of them are still struggling, but you manage to decode how to work with these innovators and all. So instead of having a conventional tendering invitation, you release a problem statement and invite innovative idea from the market.

I would love if you can share a little more about this approach and in case share a couple of examples, how do you do that?

Rikesh Shah [15:59]:

Yeah, so I think the first thing is procurement or commercial colleagues are critical partners to deliver innovation. And I think we have to move away from the notion that procurement innovation at two separate ends of the spectrum, and they just can’t get on with each other. In fact, I’ve found completely the opposite where some of the challenge we get and support we get from procurement colleagues has actually helped us deliver a better outcome. And so what we’ve done is we have commercial people within our team and the principles that a good procurement manager or a commercial manager should be doing are dare to, you know. We’re open, we’re transparent and, and we engage with anyone fairly. And, as through a level playing field, and as an innovation person, that those rules are not there to be broken they’re first principles.

Rikesh Shah [16:53]:

I think, secondly, what we found is by working in partnership with procurement colleagues is some of it is them upskilling the innovation part of the function, but also there’s some of it where the innovation team is trying to upskill procurement colleagues. How do you create this culture of the commercial manager being more entrepreneurial and being more interested in innovation and, thinking about, and making their role more interesting and, bringing innovation to their role? And what we’ve found is the commercial people that sit within our team are exactly like that, where they start thinking about different categories and how emerging technologies can help us deliver better procurements in the future. And some of the things that we’ve started to do is we don’t always pick programs that have a defined timeline, because there’s a, sometimes a tendency in the public sector that you need to produce and deliver something within X months.

Rikesh Shah [17:51]:

So if you need to do that, what happens immediately is the room for innovation is really limited. Yeah. So, what our team’s doing now is starting to think about the pipeline in the future where innovation could get involved, but there isn’t that immediate time pressure. So that’s I think the second point is really being open with the market to say, here’s some of the problems, and here’s the context around it, what ideas do you have? So let’s not go out there with a really complicated expression of interest or early market engagement. Let’s really holding on the problem and spending enough time on the problem. And go to the market and just say, what ideas do you have? And then let’s have further conversations with the market to say, you know, can you just clarify what you meant by some of the solutions that you’re presenting?

Rikesh Shah [18:37]:

And then if we’re still not sure let’s start running some trials, but let’s keep there with the market that these trials are being run to inform our future thinking before we put the RFP out there. And, then by doing that, the market is also able to test some of its innovative ideas and technologies in this context. So that’s one area. And generally that works quite often, some of the corporate organizations that have an R&D team, then there’s another way, which is we run a procurement procedure called the innovative partnerships procedure. And that procedure was, how do we set a problem statement, but then do the R&D and the scaling as part of the same procurement and the idea there was to make it easier for anyone to do enter the procurement. So we didn’t go out with a really complicated, you know, 60 page RFP, we kept it quite simple.

Rikesh Shah [19:28]:

Yeah. And we said in response, the stage was quite straightforward, which is the first stage in the procurement. And we asked some straightforward questions and we asked rather than asking for lots of insurance cover and lots of large revenues from the last few years, actually one of the questions was will you have a runway in six months’ time? So that really helped startups to get involved in the program. And what we found is then ran nine proof of concepts in 10 weeks, primarily with startups. And we paid them 20,000 pounds each, but more importantly for them, we also gave them access to some of the complicated assets in London to really test their products, the real life in scenario. And then following that, we selected two projects, two pro products, which have been scaled now in our control center. So that’s an example where you’ve started with the R&D and some, you started this with some proof of concepts.

Rikesh Shah [20:22]:

You’ve done some R&D and you’ve scaled the program in a midterm contract. So it’s a really good example of sort of an end to end element, which we are now hoping to realize the benefits through. And there are multiple other procurement route that we’ve tried, but that can only happen by the innovation team being absolutely clear on what outcomes it wants. The commercial colleagues working with them to say, well, here, a series of roots that we could work through, as opposed to, which is what I’ve seen in my organization. And elsewhere is some innovative entrepreneur in the organization runs a proof of concept. The proof of concept’s really nice, but then the procurement team will come in and say, you didn’t do this open. You didn’t do it transparently. So we need to start again. And, and, and that not only is frustrating for the innovator, it’s frustrating for the market who got involved in that program, but it’s also frustrating for the procurement colleague to say, you’ve done something really interesting here, but you didn’t approach it in the right way. So what I’m finding is my innovation colleagues working with my commercial colleagues working hand in hand, add real value.

Jaspal Singh [21:29]:

Well, that’s a great point. And I agree with you having a six-months runway for startup is very important because sometime they don’t have that much of runway. And if this project is not successful eventually they will die. Or even if it’s successful, they don’t have capacity to execute the project. And, and I think it’s important. What you mentioned is using that, How Might We HMW statement, which we do in a lot of this management consultancy and IT consultancy. How Might We HMW solve that problem. So, using that statement will be really powerful and, thank you for sharing. I think it’s a wonderful process which other agencies can also think about and adopt. Thank you.

Now, you mentioned in the past that cooperation and co-innovation with external stakeholders, including startup accelerators, venture capital firms, corporates, academia etc. is important to solve some of the challenges faced by the transport authority.

Jaspal Singh [22:22]:

You rightly mentioned, you cannot solve the new problem with the old solutions. You have to have a new solution to solve these problems. So, can you share a recent example of such cooperation and how can transport agencies structure this partnership? You already mentioned how you work with the internal colleague, but how you work with the external colleagues and further, how do you manage to convince other department to adopt this change, especially public procurement’s rule?

Let’s say if you’re doing something for operation, you got some wonderful idea, some wonderful automation process, but then you take those ideas to these department and either they don’t pick it forward, or they kill the innovation then and there. So how do you make sure, whatever innovation and new idea you found it actually succeed in the last.

Rikesh Shah [23:12]:

Yeah, so pretty split the answers into two. So the first one is how do we work with the market and how do we form these cocreation partnerships? And I think it’s really essential to build partnerships and build these collaborations because traditionally large corporates can be a bit too transactional. And so, so you, you don’t really think about the partnerships and, you think about just this one-off contract and that doesn’t create long term value for either party.

So, a couple of examples that I’ll touch on is we worked with Bosch recently. And with Bosch, they helped create a new innovation hub in London called the Connectory. And the idea was that we would share our problem statements like we would with anyone else. We would also give them access to data. We’ll give them access to some of our subject matter experts and they would in turn, bring some of their subject matter experts and, and R&D experts with some of the products that they’re developing and think if some of these emerging technologies that and solutions that they’re working on could add value to some of our problems.

Rikesh Shah [24:27]:

Could they help solve some of our problems? And we did this as a pilot to see if TfL is well equipped to work in this way. Because going back to my earlier point, transactional is more straightforward, perhaps because if the contract, since the terms and conditions, you know, what’s expected here, when it comes to innovation, you don’t even know what the output is, but you, but you know what problem you’re trying to solve. And actually, what we found was some really interesting findings. You know, the first one is taking badges off and I keep on quoting this working with Bosch. We both were very focused on the same problem. And one particular problem was if we held traffic back from densely populated areas to less densely populated areas, through traffic signaling and traffic interventions, what impact does it have when the traffic smoothly flows through the less densely populated area?

Rikesh Shah [25:17]:

And what we did is sometimes when you think about air quality, you measure it at quite a macro level. Yeah. So sensors are really high up, you may not factor in the typology of the buildings, the local environment, the type of traffic going through. So what Bosch did here is a real hyperlocal view of multiple data sets all coming together to give you an accurate view of what are you breathing in at a given time. So we’re able to test this intervention in detail and develop a model. And actually, what we found is by applying this intervention at this particular location with, at Brixton high street, it really helped reduce the exposure to bad air. So, we are now thinking of applying the same model for 1,200 traffic signal changes across London. So great example of co-developing a solution with them now, how do we get the business area involved?

Rikesh Shah [26:08]:

You’ve got to create this matrix team, which consists of the business. And actually for me, the business is critical to this whole matrix team. They own the problem they’re sponsoring the problem that we’re trying to solve. So, they need to be happy with the problem that we’re trying to solve. And that means it’s got to be a problem. That’s genuinely a concern for them that they’re struggling to solve and they want it to be solved. So, we go through quite a complicated value exercise saying, will this problem be scaled if it’s successful, will the solutions already be scaled if it’s successful? Yeah. And so really winning those hearts and minds internally to say, we will be a trusted partner of yours and we will help you solve this problem. Or we will certainly do our best to solve this problem in a completely unique way.

Rikesh Shah [26:57]:

And let’s see where it goes. And we’re fortunate that we have some really, you know, colleagues with foresight and openness and as a result, we’re able to jointly work together to solve this problem. And it’s really inspiring to see how third party, because we always had academic institutions involved with this, startups involved with this TfL involved. So, you have a seven or eight partners on this problem with the local municipality and the way they were solving this together, where your brainstorming ideas and suddenly you’re having a conversation, cause you’re all in the same room about something else. And you think actually that is a really important point. We should be solving that suddenly you’re thinking about problem solving holistically and they’re really inspiring.

Jaspal Singh [27:41]:

I can imagine the discussion having so many innovators in the same room and thinking a problem or idea in a different perspective. So, startup will bring out because they don’t have a legacy of traditional system. So, they will come out with the solution, which is innovative and can be out of the box. But at the same time, having people who are running those system to check the validity and visibility of some of those ideas. So it can be, I think there must be a lot of Aha moment in that discussion is like, we never thought about that.

Rikesh Shah [28:15]:

And I think a lot of it just is just openness and the mindset, which is both organizations are curious or all organizations, sorry, are curious, they’re vulnerable in terms of, they don’t, they’re happy to admit that don’t know all the answers. Yeah. And, suddenly you’re genuinely problem solving without any egos. And it’s amazing, you know, when it works, as you say the aha moment, it’s really powerful because this in the innovation space, some of these things haven’t been done before, so things will go wrong and you may need to iterate or you may need to stop.

Jaspal Singh [28:53]:

Oh yeah, I think like you mentioned the accepting that you don’t know something is the most powerful statement because that’s open up a door to learn yeah. With the fresh eyes. So thank you for sharing that.

The next one I want to ask about is the pandemic and the pandemic had a negative impact on the transportation sector. So TfL was responsible for more than 31 million journey every day before the pandemic, including 5 million on tubes and 7 million on buses. So how’s the number look like during the pandemic and now how much recovery you have and did innovation help in the recovery stage?

Did some of these innovative ideas help to bring back the, the passenger? And one of the points which you mentioned earlier about the London has a very ambitious future plan. You have this north star that 80% of all trip in London to be made by foot by cycle and using public transport by 2041. How do you think that open innovation will help you achieve this goal?

Rikesh Shah [29:53]:

Yeah, I mean, the pandemic has had a drastic impact on cities and, transport agencies across the world. And you know, if, if I think about going back couple of years now I’m thinking about my role at up and for the last 20 years has been to encourage people to use public transport. Suddenly overnight, it’s encouraging people not to use public transport and stay at home. It’s a big cultural change. And, you know, suddenly we had a sign, a drastic drop in terms of ridership as you’d expect and like other transport agencies and our role became to encourage and support key workers to move around safely and securely to get to the hospital, to get to the retail shops and so forth. And so, it was a big, big reduction in public transport usage.

Rikesh Shah [30:54]:

And that has lots of impact, you know, that has an impact in terms of the safety of our staff and making sure they’re safe, the safety of key workers as they’re moving around our network. So, we’re thinking about our cleaning regime enforcement of masks, how to protect driver screens. It had has a big impact in terms of providing the right marketing messaging to work closely with other partners. So, we’ve had a significant impact. And what we’re seeing now, thankfully is an increase in ridership. Yeah. And, you know, we’re around 70-80% on the buses and, then tube and. Just last week, we launched the Elizabeth line. And which is a significant milestone, one of the largest infrastructure projects in Europe and that’s connecting east and west London. So really encouraging to see.

Rikesh Shah [31:48]:

So we’re certainly see role. We’re certainly not at the pre pandemic levels, but we’re seeing more ridership than we were.

Answering your question on what it’s meant for open innovation. So we were definitely involved. And when you have a crisis like this, lots of problems are just surfacing. And we were having a regular, you know, stand up call with the wider organization. And a couple of problem statements that we got involved with one was as where there were new hospitals being built to support the NHS to as part of the pandemic response. And as a new bus route was being developed, we wanted to make sure that people, doctors and nurses, aren’t waiting at a bus stop congregated in a confined area. So we created new data sets where you can provide real time information on exactly where the bus is using GPS signals.

Rikesh Shah [32:40]:

And this was done in two weeks. You know, we had new bus routes, we had real time information and all of that was communicated to key workers. And that was done in through the innovation team, working with multiple colleagues across TfL. So a great example of agile working in a sprint manner in a two week sprint and delivering something so fast. And there’s been lots of other examples like that. So as a takeaway, it’s really important that we keep that agility and that spirit around problem solving and doing it as quickly as possible. And also, if we get it wrong, failing, fast learning from it, but maybe to the next one. So yeah, it’s been a really tough time the last few years, but there has been some learnings and innovation has played a role within it, which we need to keep going on.

Jaspal Singh [33:31]:

Oh, you rightly mentioned innovation actually helped to do that recovery faster. I mean, nobody thought we will have vaccination so fast. It’s because of this new innovation and new technology. We have vaccination so fast. And I love some of the words you mentioned in your answer about agility, sprint, failing fast, because generally you don’t hear these words from a public transport agencies or, public organization. It’s a term we use in in top-tier IT companies. But I love to hear these words from you because that’s how the world is that you need to do faster. You can’t wait like two weeks, you implemented the whole solution, which is remarkable because I think in many organizations two week is just to get the approval to think about those kinds of solutions. So it’s remarkable. You managed to date.

Rikesh Shah [34:17]:

Thank you.

Jaspal Singh [34:19]:

So another big change that happened due to pandemic and, actually why I want to ask this question because you were the part of that TfL open data strategy and set up the whole digital and open data partnership function in 2014. And you mentioned that at one particular time, there was 17,000 developers built more than 700 customer facing app, which was used by 42% of London. It’s remarkable.

But during the pandemic, what we noticed that TfL launched its own app TfL GO in 2021. And it’s received very well by everybody in London. And there were a lot of good word about that app, but so I’m curious to understand why this change in approach, why to go from open data policy and launching your own app and further, is there a plan to offer any loyalty reward to bring back procedure through this app?

Rikesh Shah [35:11]:

So, I think yes will be quite a short one, which there was a failure in the market in terms of some of the information that was being provided. And one particular area was as we are a transport service for all in our city, some of the accessibility information just wasn’t good enough. Okay. And as a result, because of that market failure, we felt we had to intervene through this app. So, it started very much focusing on accessibility and providing the right information.

Answering your question on loyalty. I don’t know. And, and then there are no plans as I’m aware, but it’s outside of my area right now. So

Jaspal Singh [35:57]:

I agree with you, there are this market failure, which led TfL to take everything in command and do it and, future, you never know. I mean, there’ll be more features will come in the future. So you never know how the future apply.

Shifting a gear a bit because I want to take advantage of your vast experience in mobility sector. So you must be meeting with hundreds of industry experts, startup ecosystem partners, who must be sharing lots of ideas about the future of mobility. And that’s what we see everywhere. We see autonomous mobility, we see Mobility as a Service. We see urban air mobility, electric vehicle, E-scooters, many other modes. So I would like to ask you which technological innovation you are more bullish about and what is your view on all these buzzword? What we hear these days in the market?

Rikesh Shah [36:47]:

Yeah, it’s a good question. And I think, there is a lot of hype in mobility and a lot of the hype is generated by people that have created new products. And, you know, when I sit down with my team, we don’t necessarily talk about blockchain or quantum computing or immersive technologies. When we’re thinking about solving problems. What we’re thinking about is let’s really understand the problem that we’re trying to solve and then think about what type of products could help solve that problem. But we don’t start with, we’ve got to do an immersive tech solution for this problem, or we’ve got to do a blockchain based solution because I’m interested in blockchain, it’s got to be around how can we solve these problems that we have? So I think the industry, and as a whole, we need to be clear on what are the near term solutions through the emerging technologies out there and by near term, I mean, one to five years.

Rikesh Shah [37:47]:

Yeah. And then what are some of the longer-term solutions, which could be the 15 to 20 years? And let’s be honest to ourselves to say, you know, so I’ll give you one example, connected autonomous vehicles. Now we don’t have to move all the way from where we are now to autonomy across London streets. Yeah. Level 5 across London streets. We can also think about what do connected cars do right now for us and how can they add value. So we’re working with a series of partners, OEMs and others. You know, we’re working with Daimler to get some data back about the connected car and understand what’s going on the road network. So the point here is that you might be creating solutions and products that could be a 15 or 20 or 30 years sort of be, but some of components of it could be relevant right now. So let’s make sure that we’re thinking about today’s problems, as well as thinking about what this could do in the long run. So that’s really important that we do that. And it’s important for us as a city authority to be having that dialogue, to say our problems around road safety, about being more active, about creating a transport for are problems that we have and challenges we have right now, how can we work with you to solve some of these, some of these problems?

Jaspal Singh [39:04]:

I agree with you, that incremental approach is all always works. So rather than going all big change one should adopt this incremental change. And like you rightly said, you don’t need to go to Level 5 for in fact, you can use this connected autonomous vehicle data to understand the driver behavior and understand how you can make your road safer and achieve that Vision Zero mission.

You partially, already answered my next question, but I actually want to ask you about these listers technology, which is web three metaverses and NFT. You mentioned, you don’t get excited with these buzzword about blockchain and all, but I must say that TfL is one of the earlier adopter of Augmented Reality to train their maintenance staff. I remember how the maintenance department used augmented reality to train the staff in a room and then take them to a real workshop.

Jaspal Singh [39:59]:

So is TfL exploring these other technologies, like with Web3, Metaverse and NFT or what do you think, or what do you see as a key benefit and challenge of these technologies? Just trying to share some of the idea which comes to my mind to build like a virtual transit network system and earn money through digital ad in whatever or launch NTD transit pass with special privilege or NFTs collections. In fact Bright Line Train in Miami, they launched the NFT collection. TFL has so much of arts around its station. So is there any plan to sell any digital arts or doing anything in those area or no plan yet?

Rikesh Shah [40:40]:

So as far as I’m aware, there’s no plans yet. But I think what’s relevant here is as an innovation department, open innovation department is whilst I focused on problems, you do need some sort of horizon scanning and foresight capability. So something that I do ask my team to think about is with some of the advances in technology, what are the potential applications in the context of transport and that’s now, and in the future. And I think it’s important to have that insight, because then when you’re trying to solve problems, you might be able to say there are only products out there or solutions out there that could be applied to solve this problem. So yeah, what’s really important is we don’t just have a really interesting piece of technology out there. And then we try and put the problem into it and, hope it works.

Rikesh Shah [41:30]:

It’s got to be the other way around, you start with the problem and then see what solutions are out there. So building that capability internally is really important. So then when we engage with the market, we can have a much more intelligent conversation, I think in terms of the different types of technologies that are out there, you know, connectivity is very interesting and it may feel already old school, but I think, you know, where are we with connectivity? And what does that mean when we start thinking about Computer Vision, AI and, and making more automated decisions? I think there’s multiple definitions of the digital twins. Yeah. And I think as an industry, we need to be much better at what we mean by the digital twins and the challenges that it brings around consistent data standards, a real single view of how we approach the digital twin.

Rikesh Shah [42:19]:

So that could be all the way from civil engineering, building the asset to maintaining and operating the asset to ultimately decommissioning the asset. And, and how does it integrate with other assets? So it’s a really interesting area, the digital twins, but I think, you know, being completely Frank, I think it’s, let’s spend more time on defining the problems. Let’s be intelligent about some of the technologies that are out there, but let’s not get too excited about being inventors and being the first to bring the technology in and then saying we were the first, but not realizing the business value or the overall value. I think it’s really important to focus on the problem and see what solutions can be more or the most effective.

Jaspal Singh [42:59]:

Yeah, I really love your answer. Starting always with the problem, not with the solution and that’s what happening in some cases that people come out with a solution and when you ask them what problem it’s solving, they don’t have answer. So having problem first is always important, not the solution. Luckily

Rikesh Shah [43:20]:

My economic hat that could be my economics hat, you know, going back all the way all those years to think about marginal value and marginal utility.

Jaspal Singh [43:28]:

That that’s very true. And I can see that how it’s linked with the economics, marketing and innovation. How it’s merging well in.

Recently, you were at the Autonomy Paris event and you had a very strong quote there, which is

“Mobility is much more than just moving people from a to B. We have to make sure it’s safe, sustainable, and equitable.”

And I must say that this is a very powerful statement, very simple, but at the same time, very powerful statement. How do you think transit agencies can achieve it, having a safe, sustainable, and equitable?

Rikesh Shah [44:01]:

So I think it’s in needs leadership and, it needs clarity of thought. I think it’s something that the whole organization needs to buy into. So it shouldn’t just sit in separate departments. And I think it’s, you know, when you’re designing new initiative, new programs, you’re really thinking about the different outcomes that potentially that could happen. And that means that it comes back to a mindset which is everyone needs say, everyone needs to buy into it and you need to make sure it’s measured.

Jaspal Singh [44:37]:

That’s true that it’s, and a lot of time we don’t measure the impact but that it’s any helpful or not.

Rikesh Shah [44:45]:

And one other point on this one just is sometimes we think, we know what the answer is, and we forget about the different stakeholders involved in the process and in particular, the end user. So it’s really, you know, when we talk about design thinking, it’s really important to have the different stakeholders, the different human beings as part of developing the solution. So, be starting with this MVP being ideal, and then coming up with the scalable solution is the right way of doing it in my view, rather than doing the big reveal at the end.

Jaspal Singh [45:22]:

Yeah. And also involving the customer in that process, sometimes these stakeholders ignore and the solution will kind of impose on them rather than involving them in the process.

Rikesh Shah [45:34]:

Well, without the customers, we don’t exist.

Jaspal Singh [45:37]:

Yeah that’s very true. If there are no public c transfer users, we don’t exist. We don’t need service. So, we need to take care of them. Now we are kind of at the end.

So my next question is what is your advice to other transit agencies, which are looking to replicate TfL model, which is very difficult to do because there is a legacy behind it. But I, I would say that setting up innovation department is a your thing. What is the heavy lifting stuff, which is not visible because a lot of time I see a lot of authority has developed extraordinary innovation department or innovation department, but it, it was never a success.

And also, the agencies are open to experimenting, but want to make sure they can go back or revert back to the, to the change quickly. If the pilot doesn’t work in short run, they don’t want dependency due to the pilot. I spoke to a lot of agencies, and they said they don’t want to do a pilot because it’ll create an impression in public mind and it’ll be difficult for them to go back. So how do you ensure there is always an option to go back to the status quo, even when you’re experimenting in a larger space?

Rikesh Shah [46:46]:

So the first thing is the internal culture, which is if you’ve got people that are really worried and, and risk averse is how do you build their confidence that you’re not going to be Maverick because innovation shouldn’t be Maverick. It should be controlled. And, and it should be thought through. And as I say, it should be revolving around the problem and, understanding how different parts, different teams fit into that process. So I think winning hearts and minds internally is critical. I think, as I say, involving different end users, as you’re experimenting is also important and you’re being open and transparent with what you’re doing. Because  if you’re focusing on a data project, people might get worried to say, what type of data are you collecting? What are you going to do with this data? So let’s be open and transparent with them.

Rikesh Shah [47:33]:

And I think you don’t always have to do everything in the public domain. You don’t need to do a big trial out there, do a desktop exercise first, bring in users into that conversation or desktop then roll out in the public domain. So I think, you know, sometimes as innovators, we want to do things really quickly. And I think you really need to understand the context and the culture of your city and your organization and the people that you’re serving and every city will be different in that context. So I think really being careful, being open, being transparent, winning hearts and minds internally and externally, and also being absolutely clear on what the findings were. And also, then seeing what you’re going to do next and put your hands up when it hasn’t worked. And so, we’ve tried this for these reasons, but it hasn’t worked or if it has worked, be clear on what you’re doing next or what you may pivot further. So I think being completely transparent is critical, particularly around emerging technologies, because I worry that some cities that I see, you know, you may launch it and then you have to deal with unintended consequences downstream.

Jaspal Singh [48:39]:

Yeah.

Rikesh Shah [48:40]:

So it’s really important to do trial and test multiple questions and scenarios as far as you can, and be challenged, be open to being challenged.

Jaspal Singh [48:51]:

Yeah, that’s true. And also like you rightly mentioned that have a focus group kind of stuff, and you can experiment in a close environment and once you get the feedback, then you should go in the open market and, and launch a limited beta and that kind of environment. But yeah, you rightly mentioned that having a control goal will always help and transparency and openness will always help when you’re open and transparent, people will understand what you’re trying to do.

Lastly, what are you excited about in the future and how is TfL is planning to expand the open innovation culture?

Rikesh Shah [49:28]:

So, so one area that I feel really strongly about is how can the public sector embrace open innovation. And, and I think there’s an incredible opportunity where we think about the public sector as an incline, the public sector across the world has a massive role to play. Yeah. And I think we need to, as public civil servants need to be much more open to innovation. We need to be much better at defining problems, curating the ecosystem, trialing things, testing things, and then scaling them.

And ultimately, you know, that means that if it creates citizen value, it’s a good thing. And I think there’s an opportunity for the public sector to really embrace this and people that say the public sector can’t innovate. I do not agree with them. I see examples of public sector innovation every day and there’s fantastic activity going on. And I think we should just, we should just build on that. So, so that’s certainly one area that excites me in terms of open innovation.

And what next, I think keeping experimenting, trying, being curious, I think got to be careful that we don’t become native. Yeah. So it’s keep that curiosity, spirit and the agile ways of working going. But ultimately, it’s about winning hearts and minds and creating business value and ultimately making life better for Londoners.

Jaspal Singh [50:53]:

That’s amazing. Now we learn about open innovation. We learn about TfL. We learn about the work you did at that place. Now we want to learn more about you, your personal side. And we have this Rapid Fire question round and basically we ask five questions to our guests and, and we’ve asked them to answer them quickly. So whatever comes to your mind.

So if you’re ready, I’ll start.

Rikesh Shah [51:15]:

Go for it.

Jaspal Singh [51:15]:

Okay. So if you were not in the marketing or innovation space, what other profession you would have selected

Rikesh Shah [51:23]:

Accounting.

Jaspal Singh [51:24]:

Accounting.

Rikesh Shah [51:26]:

Yeah. I would’ve been an accountant.

Jaspal Singh [51:28]:

It’s the plan or it’s something you want to do or it’s

Rikesh Shah [51:32]:

No. So, so this is going back to university. So, so I was always thinking I’ll be an accountant, then, then I’ve tried it for a while. I said, that’s not me.

And if it was something that I want to do now I’d want to be a tennis coach.

Jaspal Singh [51:49]:

Tennis coach. That’s amazing. We have certain guests who want to be football coach. So I think we will build a good coach team.

Now you travel so much around the world, which is your favorite city in the world. And I know it, it must be difficult for you to pick one

Rikesh Shah [52:07]:

Tel Aviv,

I think that, the entrepreneurial spirit that I see there and terms of diversity of thoughts and just the approach to product development and that very focused approach to product development is really inspiring.

Jaspal Singh [52:28]:

I love that answer. You know, that’s a one city, which I never get a chance to visit and, that’s on my radar that I need to visit. Cause that’s what I learn. It’s that innovation ecosystem.

Now the next one is even more difficult for you is which city has the best transit network in the world.

Rikesh Shah [52:49]:

So I’d answer it two fold. I think firstly, I would say London, but I’m biased. Of course.

Jaspal Singh [52:56]:

Yeah. But at the same time, everybody like London so I can tell it’s it has one of the best system

Rikesh Shah [53:04]:

And the other cities that, that really come, come to mind. I, I think it’s either Copenhagen or Amsterdam and I think you see approach to cycling. Yeah. Some people say you can’t do it in sort of conditions, weather conditions like Northern Europe, but they’ve proven that you can, you know, it’s really inspiring how people approach cycling the whole culture of cycling in those cities.

Jaspal Singh [53:28]:

You know, the funny story is that one of the guests mentioned that in the Netherlands, you can’t confront the cyclist. Like they are so powerful lobby, like in north America we have a car lobby, in the Netherlands, there is a cyclist lobby. So, you can’t touch anything. You can’t touch the lane, you can’t do anything. So you have to fight with them if you want to do something. So you rightly mentioned they have that the cycling culture, and, and it’s very strong. It’s amazing to see.

Who’s your favorite leader in the mobility sector?

Rikesh Shah [53:59]:

So I would not take any individual name, but I think I’m really inspired by some of the work going on in India with the smart cities initiative, where the way they’re really trying to think about open data. And they’re trying to think about how do you make municipalities and cities better? And you know, London has a population of 9 million. India has a population of 1.3 billion with hundreds of cities. Yeah. And the way they’re trying to drive that consistency across India is inspiring.

Jaspal Singh [54:28]:

No, that’s true. And that’s the example, I give to people here in Canada. I said like, we are not even one city in India. If I compare with Delhi and Mumbai, so we are it’s a large scale and it’s difficult to do things in India.

And my last question is if you can change one thing in your life, what would it be?

Rikesh Shah [54:52]:

I think let’s make sustainability and active forms of transport, a reality, you know, let’s really walk more cycle more and use public transport more and realize its vision that that was set out in London.

Jaspal Singh [55:06]:

Great. Thank you so much. Rikesh I mean, I really loved our conversation and I really love your answers. They were concise. They were bang on the target. What you’re trying to convey. I thank you so much for your time. Thank you.

Rikesh Shah [55:18]:

No, likewise. Jaspal thank you