The interplay of competencies and governance settings in dealing with uncertainty: A comparison of mobility as a service in the Netherlands and Australia.

Actors experience considerable uncertainty when developing and realizing mobility innovations that can contribute in the transition to a sustainable transport system. Although the role of uncertainty and its handling is mentioned as important in the literature on transitions and innovations, there is a lack of understanding how uncertainty affects decision-making processes and actors themselves. This paper investigates the interplay of uncertainty competencies and governance settings in four innovation cases of Mobility as a Service (MaaS). Our findings demonstrate it is difficult to sustain MaaS beyond a research trial, because actors experience too much uncertainty about governance questions of long-term responsibilities and role distribution. Although individual actors possess effective project management skills and willingness to innovate in a trial context, they are unable to bring MaaS to a next level because MaaS is not seen as a part of a larger design quest in which stakeholders experiment and play with uncertainty through different institutional configurations. • Exploring innovation processes through actors' experience of uncertainty enables to explain why they (do not) move forward. • In uncertain innovation trials, uncertainty is often translated by actors as risk that should be reduced. • Innovation trials are good at resolving uncertainties on a project level. • Full implementation of mobility innovations requires broader experimentation with actor responsibilities and legislative configurations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]