What’s really blocking transport innovation?

During the Transport Research Arena (TRA) Conference 2026 in Budapest, PNO Innovation hosted an interactive stakeholder engagement activity inviting participants to reflect on one central question: “What’s blocking future transport?”

Attendees from across the European transport and mobility ecosystem, including industry representatives, researchers, public authorities, startups, and innovation stakeholders, contributed insights through open discussion boards at the PNO booth.

The results revealed a strong consensus: the main barriers to future transport are no longer purely technological. Instead, participants consistently highlighted fragmentation across actors and systems, financing and scale-up challenges, regulatory complexity, lack of coordination and ownership, insufficient market readiness, and limited societal acceptance as the key obstacles preventing innovation from moving successfully from development to large-scale deployment and adoption.

Overall, the discussions demonstrated that enabling the future of transport requires not only technological innovation, but also stronger ecosystem coordination, governance alignment, market creation, and public trust.

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Why transport innovation struggles to scale

What prevents transport innovations from being deployed successfully?

Coordination and fragmentation emerged as some of the most recurring challenges identified by participants. Stakeholders consistently highlighted the difficulty of aligning public authorities, operators, technology providers, infrastructure owners, and end users across different governance levels and operational environments.

Contributions repeatedly referred to the need for better coordination between different involved agents, stronger alignment, improved integration between multiple agencies and systems, and more effective mechanisms for finding the right partners. Overall, participants stressed that many deployment barriers are not primarily technological, but instead rooted in organisational complexity, fragmented governance structures, and limited cross sector collaboration.

Financing and operational readiness also emerged as critical barriers to successful deployment. Participants consistently highlighted the lack of sufficient deployment funding, difficulties in finding customers, uncertainty around ROI, and the high costs associated with implementation, certification, and operational integration. Concerns around finance at user level and the broader fear of financial loss further reflected the perceived economic risks associated with adopting new transport solutions. 

Participants also identified significant skills, acceptance, and capacity gaps linked to implementation and adoption. Stakeholders referred to the lack of workforce skills, insufficient training opportunities, resistance to organisational change, and limited awareness of the potential benefits of innovation.

Participants repeatedly stressed that successful deployment depends not only on technological maturity, but also on acceptance and willingness to use new solutions, as well as the ability to make people understand and believe in the value of innovation. The discussions therefore reinforced the importance of stakeholder education, user engagement, and societal readiness as critical enablers of future transport transformation. 

Regulation and interoperability were likewise consistently identified as major barriers to deployment and scaling. Participants referred to fragmented national regulations, slow governance and decision-making processes, strict certification requirements, and persistent difficulties related to data sharing and interoperability between systems and actors. The discussions demonstrated a clear need for more harmonised, flexible, and innovation ready governance frameworks capable of supporting cross border integration and large-scale implementation.

The commercialisation gap: from pilot projects to market impact

Why do transport innovations struggle to become viable businesses?

A dominant theme throughout the discussions was Europe’s difficulty in transforming innovation into scalable and commercially viable business models. Participants consistently referred to fragmented markets, weak commercial pathways, limited investor engagement, and the persistence of pilot projects without long-term deployment.

One of the clearest recurring messages highlighted that there are “a lot of pilot projects that do not turn into business”, reflecting a widespread perception that Europe performs strongly in innovation generation, but less effectively in scaling and commercialisation.

A recurring concern was that many innovations remain technology driven rather than problem driven, resulting in solutions that struggle to generate clear market value, operational relevance, or societal demand. Participants stressed the need for stronger alignment between innovation development, user needs, business cases, and real operational challenges in order to ensure successful commercial uptake.

The discussions also demonstrated that accessibility, inclusiveness, and adoption depend on much more than technology availability alone. Stakeholders consistently identified affordability, trust, infrastructure readiness, policy fragmentation, and lack of public awareness as major barriers preventing wider uptake of transport innovations.

Among these themes, trust emerged as one of the strongest recurring concepts across the discussions. Participants repeatedly connected adoption to transparency, interoperable systems, reliable data exchange, and user confidence, with one particularly strong contribution stating that “trust is better than love”.

Participants further stressed the importance of designing solutions around real user needs rather than “technology for technology’s sake”, ensuring innovations remain affordable, understandable and usable across society. Several stakeholders also highlighted the need for greater awareness, stronger user involvement and a willingness to embrace new approaches.

What stakeholders told us: key lessons for the future of transport

The discussions at TRA 2026 revealed a broad consensus: the future of transport is not blocked by a lack of innovation itself, but by the challenge of translating innovation into scalable, coordinated, trusted and economically viable solutions.

Future progress will depend on stronger collaboration across the innovation ecosystem, improved commercialisation pathways, more interoperable governance frameworks and a greater focus on deployment readiness and societal adoption.

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