Navigating the next Mobility wave

At Nomads, we spend a lot of time with organisations who are asking the same question in different ways:

“Where is mobility really going, and how should we respond?”

To answer that, we do more than follow headlines. We track weak signals, test them against each other, and look for patterns that point to meaningful shifts in how people, goods and energy move through the world.

The Insight Radar you see in your dashboard is one of the tools we use for that work. Built on Envisioning’s Signals platform, it pulls together hundreds of early indicators around mobility, organises them into themes, and helps us see where technology, regulation, behaviour and business models might be heading next.

This article is our way of opening that work up to you.

We’ve taken the current mobility radar and distilled it into a Nomads point of view, along with practical prompts you can use in your own practice as a strategist, designer, technologist or consultant.

In this piece, you’ll find:

• The major shifts we see emerging in mobility (from ownership to access, from data as exhaust to data as infrastructure, from regulation as constraint to regulation as design tool, and more).
• How those shifts play out for organisations we work with.
• What they mean for you as a member of the Nomads Community – in terms of opportunities, skills, and new kinds of projects.

Think of it as a field note from our ongoing research: a starting point for conversations with your clients, collaborators, and fellow Nomads about what comes next in mobility.

1. From ownership to access

One of the clearest patterns on the radar is a shift away from “my vehicle” toward “my access to movement.”

We see clusters of signals around:

• Subscription-based mobility models – where people pay monthly for a bundle of mobility services instead of owning a car
• Shared micromobility – e-bikes and scooters with secondary markets, where individuals or operators can lease or re-lease assets dynamically
• Corporate mobility benefit pools – employers replacing company cars with flexible mobility budgets that can be used across modes

In parallel, Mobility-as-a-Service concepts are maturing: not just one app that aggregates transport options, but cities and operators working together to make public and private services function as a coherent system.

What this means for organisations

For many of our clients, this shift challenges deeply held assumptions:

• Revenue models need to move from one-off sales to ongoing relationships
• Brand value depends less on the physical product and more on the quality, reliability and emotional experienceof the service
• Partnerships become critical – no single actor can deliver a seamless journey end-to-end

What this means for you as a Nomad

For members of the Nomads Community, this opens up demand for:

• People who can design and communicate service ecosystems, not just isolated touchpoints
• Skills in subscription and bundle design, journey mapping, pricing models, loyalty and churn
• New ways to tell stories about mobility – shifting from product narratives (“this car”) to life narratives (“this is how you move through your day”)

When you encounter a mobility-related brief, a useful question to hold is:

“If the customer never owns the asset, how does that change the story, the UX and the relationship?”

2. Data as the new infrastructure

Another strong pattern is around mobility data – who controls it, how it is shared and how value is created from it.

Across the radar we see signals about:

• Mobility data spaces and exchanges that allow different stakeholders (cities, operators, OEMs, platforms) to share data in controlled ways
• Data marketplaces where telemetry, routing and usage data are traded or pooled under shared rules
• Emerging privacy and governance frameworks specific to location and mobility data
• New financial and ownership models, from decentralised data cooperatives to tokenised infrastructure funding

The direction is clear: data is becoming a core layer of mobility infrastructure, not just exhaust from operations. At the same time, questions around privacy, consent and fairness are becoming more concrete.

For organisations

This creates both pressure and opportunity:

• Mobility players need credible strategies for participating in shared data ecosystems
• Trust will hinge on being transparent about what data is collected, why and for whose benefit
• There is a design gap around making data governance human-readable – for users, employees and regulators

For Nomads talent

For our community, this is an area where creative and strategic skills can have real impact:

• Translating abstract data and policy concepts into clear, respectful experiences
• Designing consent flows, dashboards and narratives that help people feel informed rather than exploited
• Helping organisations imagine new value exchanges, where citizens or customers also benefit from the data they generate

A practical prompt when you work with mobility or smart city data:

“If a traveller saw how their data flows through this system, would they understand it – and would it feel fair?”

3. Cities as orchestrators, not just regulators

The radar also shows a wave of policy innovation around mobility. Cities and regions are not simply enforcing rules; they are starting to orchestrate behaviour and business models.

We see signals related to:

• Low-emission zones, zero emission mandates and emission caps for urban fleets
• Dynamic curb pricing and tolling, with costs changing based on congestion or environmental impact
• Carbon-linked mobility allowances, where high-emission travel is constrained or priced through markets
• Frameworks for urban air mobility, stratified airspace zoning and new liability constructs for autonomous systems

This is mobility policy as active design, not just passive compliance.

For organisations

For clients and partners, this means:

• Regulation becomes a design material – shaping product, service and business model decisions from the start
• Organisations need to understand not just current rules, but the direction of policy travel
• Public–private collaboration is crucial, particularly as mobility intersects with housing, health, climate and economic policy

For Nomads talent

For you as a Nomad, this opens up:

• Work that sits at the intersection of service design and policy – for example, prototyping tools that help citizens navigate low-emission zones, carbon budgets or shared streets
• Opportunities to facilitate conversations between city officials, operators, tech teams and communities
• The need to feel comfortable reading both human stories and regulatory documents, and connecting them

A useful mindset here:

“Where is regulation a constraint – and where could it become a lever for better, fairer mobility?”

4. Mobility as a bridge between sectors

Perhaps the most exciting part of the radar is what happens at the edges: where mobility meets other industries.

Signals point to growing fusion between mobility and:

• Energy – vehicles as grid resources, charging infrastructure as part of energy strategy, fleets participating in grid balancing
• Healthcare – on-demand medical transport, mobile clinics, health services integrated into mobility platforms
• Entertainment and hospitality – venues that double as multi-modal mobility hubs, and travel time reimagined through “hospitality capsules” and experience-driven transit
• Retail and logistics – subterranean logistics, drone corridors, and transit-adjacent real estate that merge movement, commerce and fulfillment

In our client work, we are seeing similar patterns: projects that start in “mobility” quickly touch energy procurement, healthcare access, entertainment formats or retail footprint.

For organisations

For organisations, this means:

• New cross-sector revenue models, from energy-as-a-service bundled with transport to health outcomes linked to mobility access
• The need to think in terms of platforms and ecosystems, not single-industry solutions
• A higher premium on building strategic partnerships, supported by shared data, governance and brand narratives

For Nomads talent

For the community, this plays directly to our strengths:

• You do not need to define yourself as “a mobility specialist” – brand strategists, service designers, digital product people, sustainability leads, researchers and creatives all have a role here
• The most interesting work will often sit between sectors, requiring teams that are comfortable crossing boundaries
• Our constellation model – assembling bespoke teams from the Nomads network – is well-suited to these hybrid challenges

When you encounter a brief in this space, try asking:

“If we stopped thinking of this as a ‘mobility project’ and instead as an ‘energy–health–culture–mobility project’, what new questions appear?”

5. Using the Insight Radar in your practice

The radar is not meant to sit in the background as a pretty visual. It is there to be used – by all of us.

Here are three practical ways you can bring it into your work as a Nomad.

As a conversation starter with clients

Use the radar to frame discussions, especially early in an engagement:

• Highlight two or three clusters that relate to their world (e.g. subscriptions, data, regulation, cross-sector plays)
• Share one signal as a “now” indicator and one as a “next” provocation
• Ask what resonates, what feels uncomfortable and where they already see early signs

This positions you as someone who can connect foresight with concrete decisions, rather than repeating generic trend lists.

As a source of creative briefs

Treat individual signals as micro-briefs:

• A data-cooperative signal could become a concept sprint around user-centred data governance
• A carbon-linked mobility allowance signal could spark ideas for tools that help people plan lower-emission journeys
• A cross-industry signal could trigger an internal exploration on what a new partnership might look like

You can bring these into active projects, community meetups or self-initiated experiments.

As a personal learning roadmap

Finally, use the radar to guide your own growth:

• Notice which areas feel familiar and which feel like new terrain
• Pick one or two clusters (e.g. “regulation and governance”, “data spaces and AI”, “energy–mobility convergence”) and decide to learn more over the next months
• Use other Nomads as learning partners: share articles, run small sessions, or simply ask “who else is curious about this?”

This keeps your skills evolving in step with the systems you are working in.

Closing: navigating together

Our work at Nomads is built on a simple belief: transformation is not a moment, it is a mindset.

The Insight Radar helps us see how mobility is transforming as a system – but seeing is only half the work. The rest lies in how we respond, as individuals, as teams and as a community.

As you explore the radar, you might ask yourself:

• Which patterns matter most for the kind of work I want to be doing?
• How could I use these insights to start a more strategic conversation with a client or partner?
• Who in the Nomads Community could I collaborate with to explore one of these themes more deeply?

If you would like to run a small session using the radar – for a client, for your own portfolio, or as a community meetup – reach out to the Nomads team. We can co-design something that combines your expertise, our methodology, and the Signals view.

The future of mobility will not be shaped by one organisation or one sector. It will be shaped by the kinds of creative, borderless, purpose-led collaborations that this community was created for.