The beat was already there: What shared mobility can learn from hip-hop and a room full of people clapping

There is a persistent myth about innovation: that breakthrough ideas appear out of nowhere and disruption is born from genius. Let’s not forget the one where the future is invented from scratch.

It rarely works that way. When you actually look at companies that changed industries, most of them didn’t invent new things. They borrowed, sampled, translated. Spotify didn’t invent subscriptions. Airbnb didn’t invent trust between strangers. Nike didn’t invent identity. What they got right is that innovation tends to happen when an idea crosses from one sector into another and finds new friction to solve.

For a year now, Mpact has been doing exactly that kind of thinking, with a small internal team we call the innovation cell, structurally embedded in how the company works. After mapping out where we wanted to go, the first real move was to plant that innovation seed, both inside and outside the company. That led us to the Cross-Industry Transfer Map workshop at Shared Mobility Rocks.

Why this session?

This year’s theme for Shared Mobility Rocks was ‘Time to scale up’. At Mpact, we have been reflecting a lot on what scaling shared mobility actually requires. For years, it has mainly been approached as a technical challenge: more integrations, better software, larger fleets. All valid. But in practice, adoption rarely depends on technology alone.

People don’t start using shared mobility because an app exists. They start when it feels trustworthy or when a neighbour recommends it. At these moment, shared mobility stops feeling weird and starts feeling normal. And yet the sector still treats these as soft factors, nice to have, hard to measure, easy to defer. We track utilisation rates and fleet efficiency in granular detail. Trust and belonging stay secondary.

That gap is what drove the session. If shared mobility is fundamentally about behaviour and trust, why would we only look inward for lessons? Why not learn from hospitality, gaming, retail, streaming, fashion, culture?

The workshop, called Not Made in Mobility , asked participants to stop thinking about mobility altogether for a while. We looked at Airbnb, Spotify, Lego, Nike, Wikipedia, Too Good To Go. The brief was deliberately simple: don’t copy the product. Sample the principle.

Then came the pitches. Not with polite applause. With Queen’s We Will Rock You, clapped collectively by fifteen people in a conference room in Vienna, while one slightly nervous person from each group stood up to present their idea.

The question nobody could answer

Once the pitches started, the same question kept coming up in different words from different groups:

Why did Airbnb scale to 220 countries and 8 million listings in roughly fifteen years, while peer-to-peer car sharing is still a niche product almost everywhere?

Both ask the same thing of people: trust a stranger with something valuable. Airbnb asks you to let someone sleep in your bed. Peer-to-peer car sharing asks you to hand over your car keys. One became a verb. The other is still trying to become a habit.

One participant put it well during their pitch: “Figuring out the trust, it’s somehow different, letting a stranger into your car than letting them into your home. That’s the real challenge. That’s what we have to solve.”

Nobody had a clean answer, which felt honest.

The tractor nobody expected

The pitch that got the biggest laugh of the afternoon was also the one that stayed with us longest. The concept: an Airbnb-style platform for rural vehicles and equipment. Not just cars, but tractors, trailers, vans. Machinery that spends eleven months a year sitting in a barn.

The facilitator’s reaction was immediate: “Never heard of tractor sharing before. But actually, tractor sharing is huge in the countryside. It’s just informal, between neighbours. That’s the thing.”

Peer-to-peer sharing of high-value, rarely-used assets has existed in rural communities for generations. People already do it without an app, without a review system, without a platform. The social infrastructure was always there. The digital layer never came.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: how much of what the sector calls innovation is really just catching up with what communities were already doing on their own?

What the session actually produced

The workshop generated a wide range of concepts: Airbnb-inspired reputation systems for peer-to-peer mobility, Spotify-style subscriptions built around lifestyles instead of transport modes, Wikipedia-inspired community governance models, Nike-inspired storytelling that makes shared mobility emotionally attractive instead of purely rational. 

The answers kept pointing in the same direction. Scaling shared mobility is not only about growing user numbers or expanding fleets. It is about building systems people genuinely want, and are able to, belong to. Systems that feel trustworthy and where the social norms are already present or actively cultivated. That means the next phase won’t only be shaped by engineers and operators. It’ll need behavioural designers, storytellers, community builders, people who understand the difference between running a platform and building something people feel genuinely attached to.

Fun fact: Two participants actually sang their pitch. Fully committed, melody and everything. That moment of breaking the expected format, of doing something nobody anticipated, was more memorable than any slide deck presented that day.

What hip-hop actually means here

Sampling as a creative practice predates hip-hop. Its roots go back to musique concrète in the 1940s and the experimental studio techniques of the 1950s and 60s. Hip-hop, emerging from the Bronx in the late 1970s, transformed sampling from a technical curiosity into a core creative discipline. Pioneering DJs like DJ Kool Herc isolated the rhythmic “breaks” in funk and soul records, extending them on two turntables to keep dancers moving. That is what the workshop asked participants to do. Not copy Airbnb. Not build Spotify for cars. But ask: what is the underlying principle? What human problem did they solve? What made it work? And then: what would that look like here, in shared mobility?

Why this matters for Mpact and for the shared mobility sector

At Mpact, we see shared mobility not only as a mobility transition, but as a societal transition. Questions like who feels included, who trusts the system, who participates, who wants to pay for what are just as important as operational performance.

The session reinforced something we have been sitting with for a while: the organisations that will define the next phase of shared mobility may not be the ones with the biggest fleets or the best apps. They may be the ones that succeed in organising trust and collective value at scale, that understand the difference between building a platform and building a community.

The tractor shared informally between neighbours is not a failure of technology. It is proof that the social instinct to share already exists. The question, the real design challenge, is how to give it infrastructure that works at scale, without destroying what makes it work in the first place.

Shared mobility is still a relatively young ecosystem. That is its biggest strength. It means we still have the freedom to rethink what mobility can become not just as infrastructure, but as access, participation and community.

The beat was already there, we just need to learn how to sample it properly.

Sources

• RAC Foundation (2022). Standing Still: The under-utilisation of cars in England. racfoundation.org
• Zaigham et al. (2024). Trust as a mediator in shared mobility adoption. Discover Sustainability, Springer Nature. doi.org/10.1007/s43621-024-00372-6
• De Lange, J. (2025). Car Sharing Adoption in the Netherlands: An Explorative Study. University of Amsterdam Open Research.
• Barriers to peer-to-peer car sharing adoption (2026). Transportation Research Part A, ScienceDirect. doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2026.xxx
• Shared mobility adoption in rural towns (2025). European Transport Research Review, Springer Nature. doi.org/10.1186/s12544-025-00739-4
• Airbnb statistics (2024). Airbnb Newsroom & Britannica Money. britannica.com/money/Airbnb
• Lucid Samples (2025). Historical origins of classic hip-hop samples. lucidsamples.com

Mpact works on shared mobility and the social infrastructure that makes shared systems sustainable. Want to think along, push back, or collaborate? We would love to hear from you.