Smart MOVE, Global Urban Mobility Challenge

Year: 2023–2024  |  Client: GIZ  |  Country: India

Cities Forum supported Smart MOVE, a global Urban Mobility Challenge run on behalf of GIZ to spark innovative solutions to the mobility problems facing Indian cities. Some of the most intractable urban-mobility challenges are best addressed not by a single plan but by mobilising the creativity of a broad ecosystem of innovators; Smart MOVE was designed to do exactly that, to surface, sharpen and showcase fresh ideas capable of improving how people and goods move through India's cities.

Our approach

The initiative took the form of an open challenge that invited innovators to develop and propose solutions to real urban-mobility issues, harnessing the energy of start-ups, technologists, researchers and entrepreneurs around a shared set of problems. As a global challenge with a focus on Indian cities, it connected international creativity with local needs, and it was explicitly aligned with the Government of India's flagship programmes to promote digital innovation and smart urban mobility, situating the effort within the national push towards technology-enabled, data-driven and citizen-centred transport.

What we delivered

Cities Forum's support helped give the challenge structure and substance: framing the mobility problems in ways that could attract and guide innovative responses, supporting the process by which ideas were developed and assessed, and connecting the initiative to the wider policy and innovation context so that promising solutions could find a pathway towards real-world application. A well-run challenge does more than pick winners; it builds a community, signals priorities, and creates momentum around innovation, and Cities Forum's involvement was geared to these lasting outcomes as much as to the event itself.

Impact

By encouraging innovative solutions and aligning them with national smart-mobility and digital-innovation programmes, Smart MOVE contributed to a more dynamic, solution-oriented approach to India's urban-mobility challenges. For Cities Forum, the engagement reinforced its role as a convener and enabler of mobility innovation, complementing its planning and advisory work with the ability to catalyse and channel the creativity of the broader ecosystem, in partnership with GIZ and in step with India's national ambitions.