Shift Magazine - October 7, 2019 - 6

TEAMING for

SUCCESS

10 ways to boost effectiveness of public-private partnerships
BY DALE BUSS

W

hen it comes to making
urban mobility initiatives
successful, public-private
partnerships have proved
to be a crucial ingredient.
Participants say suspending some traditional boundaries between government
and business entities is important to
avoid initial stumbles.
"These partnerships are inevitable and
absolutely indispensable to the future of
transportation," said Rick Walawender,
leader of the autonomous vehicle practice at Miller Canfield law firm in Detroit.
Among the public-private partnerships
in the sector are:
* Project Kinetic in Detroit, in which
the city and companies including General Motors and Bedrock
Detroit are launching mobility pilots
for transportation in underserved
communities.
* An autonomous shuttle system
being tested in Hamburg, Germany,
by governments and a unit of auto
supplier Siemens.
* The Smart Mobility Ecosystem
in Dublin, Ohio, which joins auto
supplier Denso with Ohio officials to gather traffic data, test
mobility concepts and implement
AV-infrastructure pilots.
In each of these partnerships, and in
dozens of others forming around the

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shift * october 2019

world, participants are grappling with
important and complex new technologies, resource constraints, an array of
expectations by shareholders and by
public constituencies, the limitations of
existing municipal services and infrastructures, differing benchmarks for success - and prospects for failure.
Here are 10 strategies they're using to
make the partnerships effective.

1. START EARLY - AND FAST

Detroit found that using information and
relationships from its failed effort in 2018
to land Amazon's "second headquarters"
helped give Project Kinetic a fast start.
"We took advantage of that momentum to say, 'Let's take another opportunity to work together,' said Mike Quinn, a
Boston Consulting Group principal working on Project Kinetic.
But what really accelerated the effort
was the partners' determination to
launch a 12-week "innovation sprint" in
early 2018 to brainstorm more than 120
ideas, which the consortium ultimately
narrowed to the five it initiated for Project
Kinetic (See Page 14).

2. BUILD A BIG TENT

A partnership to turn 537 miles of roads
in Colorado into a connected highway
includes Ford, Qualcomm, Panasonic, the
federal government, Denver International
Airport and a bevy of consultants as well

as the state government.
"All this involvement is a little vision of
what needs to happen with every project,
all over the world's transportation grid,"
Walawender said.

3. PROVIDE NEW GATEWAYS

For Project Kinetic, a Michigan business-development entity called PlanetM
became a crucial accelerant.
"A big part of their role is to create
new partnerships and opportunities and
an environment favorable to them," said
Kevin Bopp, vice president of parking
and mobility for Bedrock Detroit, a major
parking vendor and commercial real
estate player in the city. "They don't act
like government."

4. BE RESPONSIVE

From the start of Project Kinetic, "we
had to check our egos at the door and
participate in full transparency and collaboration, given the schedule of where
to be and when to be there," Bopp said.
"That's part of what made it so successful: telling everyone what their role
needed to be."

5. CREATE WIN-WINS

Companies and governments need to
find reasons to participate. Cities "often
fear a bit that they'll be left out and
behind when only private companies are
involved," said Jan Voss, Siemens project
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