What we learned in designing the Detroit ‘Transforming Freight’ Challenge

Everyone knows something about Detroit. You might think of the auto industry and the industrial heritage. Or maybe you think of Motown or Eminem. Or, more recently, the municipal bankruptcy, or the story of the hollowing out (and subsequent resurgence) of America’s cities. If you’re into urban regeneration, maybe your mind goes to Dan Gilbert and Quicken Loans, or the historic rebirth of Michigan Central Station anchoring the new innovation district.

All these things were on my mind as our team of researchers and designers from Challenge Works visited the city in March, along with our partners from Toyota Mobility Foundation and World Resources Institute, under the umbrella of the Sustainable Cities Challenge. We were there to kick off a four-month design sprint with Detroit to better understand and define the problem to be solved and the opportunity for innovation.

Our goal for the week was to create a tightly defined open innovation challenge centred around decarbonising freight operations in the city’s Eastern Market. To get there, we had to get under the skin of the city, the people, the systems underlying how Eastern Market and the surrounding neighbourhood work, and the ripple effects that solving the challenge could have – intended and unintended. 

This thinking began back in November, when Detroit was one of 10 shortlisted cities that participated in our capacity building programme to upskill city leaders on problem identification and challenge definition and design. We started work with the team from Detroit then to explore freight operations in Eastern Market and different levers that could be pulled to decarbonise the sector, and by February, Detroit had been selected as one of the three partner cities so we could begin work in earnest.

The collaborative design process

Coming back to our goal for the week: we needed to identify the innovation gap and the opportunity for innovators, map out the challenge structure, determine the impact goals, and create the criteria for success. And it is far better to do this through a collaborative, evidence-driven approach – we know we’ll get better solutions in the end if we engage the people and institutions affected from the start, rather than just decide all of the design ourselves.

Taking this all in, we mapped out:

• The problem space: how to cut emissions while improving efficiencies?
• The opportunity for innovation: this would include tech, but also the innovation gaps in service design and product adoption.
• The barriers to innovation and what has been tried already: this is about costs, but also operation standards, expectations of the buyers and sellers, cultural norms, and traditions.
• The stakeholders: who are the beneficiaries of solving these problems? Who are the customers that would buy or sustain solutions? Who will use the solutions? Who are the enablers, or the blockers? And who would create the solutions? 

We ran a series of exercises with our partners at the city and the market, as well as local experts working in tech and mobility, to answer these questions. 

For starters, we created nine potential challenge statements, all focused on different dimensions of the problem and the points of innovation, and stress-tested each of them to examine their suitability to solving through open innovation, their potential impact, and feasibility given the time and budget. We considered various linchpins to solve the problem: is it data? Is it cold-chain storage? Idling time? Fuel?

We also explored the existing tech infrastructure and what innovators would need to help develop solutions and test prototypes. For example, what data already exists and what can easily be obtained, and how? How could we work with local partners to do product testing – virtually, in a testing facility, and in the market itself?

Based on the working challenge statement, we then mapped out the judging criteria, by brainstorming the information that we would need from innovators so that the judges could compare and choose the best solutions for developing, testing, and ultimately implementation. We categorised these into performance measures (does it work?), relevance (will it be used?), innovation (what does it offer that is new?), capability (can this team do it?), impact (does it help solve the problem?) and viability (will it last?). 

And finally, we mapped out the challenge structure. This includes not just the timeline and syncing that timeline with the growing seasons and peaks and troughs of market activity, but also the stage-gates, the number of innovators we can support, and the types of incentives and support they would need, in both funding but also connections, testing, and capacity building. 

We experimented with different variations of these factors, and tested our ideas with the market and the city, to calibrate the challenge activities to the market and the operators’ capacity, based on a set of emerging guiding principles:

• Balance co-design and demonstration with real-world operations: solutions created as part of the challenge need to be relevant and co-designed with operators and Eastern Market – and we need to minimise disruption of day-to-day market operations.
• Look at all the angles: anticipate and mitigate negative unintended consequences of potential solutions to the market and the community
• Create enduring solutions: prioritise solutions that feature interoperability and transparency so solutions can serve the market in the long-term. 

After our time on the ground in the city ended, we continued to iterate and refine the challenge design and theory of change, debating the details and modelling different scenarios, with our partners in the city and with industry experts and potential challenge entrants, until we felt confident and ready to launch in May.