30 Jun 2020

On June 24th, Cycling Industries Europe officially launched their Expert Group on Market Impact and Intelligence.

CIE’s new Expert Group has the ambition to become a unique Think tank for cycling, attracting top strategic leaders and analysts from all sectors of cycling. The group will gather evidence and produce intelligence that will allow accurate market forecasting, stronger promotion of the industry, and better information for the industry as well as NGOs, policymakers and investors. The invitation is now open for CIE members to join the group and other companies to join CIE and be part of this important initiative.

This Expert Group is for everyone from strategic leaders and planners who need to know the medium- and long-term direction for their companies, to market researchers and analysts with a particular interest in cycling. For broader and better-quality intelligence, CIE has identified diversity as the key benefit of the new structure.  Diversity in terms of data sources as well as in terms of the people producing intelligence from the data. This is also key to make the data work not only industry- and market-wise, but also to attract investment and motivate measures and policies that will help grow cycling.

The Expert Group will complement CIE’s existing Expert Groups, providing expertise on market research and intelligence to the groups that work on bike sharing, connected cycling, cargo bikes and industry sustainability.

Summing up the launch, Raymond Gense, Director of Public Affairs and Future Technologies at PON said: “It’s very encouraging what I see. We can see that we can do a lot more with data. This is a role for CIE that we really want to take now and for the future. We can do it because of the possibilities we get from our members, the more members we have the more work we can do, its as easy as that”.

A core group of companies and CIE partners has been working on the concept since before the coronavirus pandemic, including bike companies like PON, market research experts SMS and Data Trails, global cycle counting experts Eco-Counter and app maker Geovelo. They were quickly able to react to the crisis and create two COVID Business Impact surveys, national COVID recovery case studies as well as the first ever Cargo Bike Market Survey, showcasing the tangible benefits of shared knowledge from multiple sources.  

These examples demonstrated the importance of data intelligence, which is the overarching aim of the new Expert Group; looking at impacts and measures such as investment in infrastructure, government policies, subsidies, etc., and applying intelligence in order to make predictions and projections for the wider cycling industry.

The pandemic has enhanced and perhaps made more pressing the questions that have been coming into the mobility market, around growth, sustainability and impact – particularly relating to the bicycle, which has emerged as one of the solutions to keep us mobile during and after corona. These questions are opportunities for the cycling industry to step up and gather, share, combine and analyze data in order to provide actual intelligence about the role of the bicycle, what it can do and what it can lead to, and how the cycling market can and will grow. And not only the bicycle itself, but everything it relates to – urban logistics, new technologies, urban mobility, manufacturing, etc. This intelligence is key not only for the industry itself, but also for policymakers, investors and planners, to help them see why and how planning for and investing in the cycling industry is beneficial.

If you want to join the leading market intelligence experts of the industry, you can find out more about the wider benefits of CIE and membership here.

 

Image: See.Sense

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