Mobility as a Service (MaaS)

Jens is the head of partnerships and business development at Skipr. He’s responsible to get mobility partners on-board Skipr and for the commercial success in the business customer segment. Before this Jens worked for the investment fund which incubated and launched Skipr. He has a background in digital strategy consulting and studied business and engineering at the University of Ghent and Toulouse.

Piia Karjalainen is Secretary General of the MaaS Alliance in Brussels, Belgium. The MaaS Alliance is an international public-private partnership bringing together more than 95 member organisations worldwide. She has previously worked at the European Parliament and the Finnish Ministry of Transport & Communications.

Ida Schauman joined MaaS Global at the beginning of 2020 to lead the company’s work on policy. She has an extensive background in Public Affairs, having worked with mobility issues as a policy professional at the Parliament of Finland, as a consultant and as a full-time politician. Prior to joining MG, she functioned as Head of Public Affairs at a UN organisation. In addition to her professional work, Schauman is a City Councillor and a member of the City Council board in Turku, one of the largest cities in Finland.

Karen Vancluysen was appointed as Secretary General of POLIS in September 2014, after having been the network’s Research Director for 8 years. Prior to that, she worked as network manager at ACCESS-Eurocities and as project manager at Langzaam Verkeer, a Belgian centre for mobility management. Since 1998, Karen has been involved in European urban transport networking and policy activities, and EU research and innovation projects covering a wide range of urban mobility topics. She has been a speaker and moderator at many high-level events in Europe and beyond, on a wide range of urban mobility themes approached from the perspective of cities and the governance of innovation.

POLIS is the leading European network of cities and regions on urban transport innovation. For over 30 years already, members have been working together to develop and deploy sustainable and innovative urban mobility solutions for the city of today and tomorrow.

Gunnar Nehrke is the managing director of one of Europe’s oldest and biggest carsharing associations. Founded in 1998, the bcs promotes carsharing as the sustainable way of using cars and
works for the integration of carsharing into the network of public transport. With more than 150 operators and around 2 Million customers Germany is one of the leading carsharing markets
worldwide.

Mr. Nehrke has been responsible for the bcs public relations activities since 2015 and became managing director in 2018. Previously he worked as a business consultant for the retail industry.

Christof is the Managing Director Commercial of Trafi and in this role further building global business. He was an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company Inc. with a spike in the automotive industry and has held several marketing executive roles in online companies and startups like Zalando. Christof holds a Diploma of Business Administration from Handelshochschule Leipzig.

Jakob Michael Heider is working for BVG since 2018, first as Head of e-Commerce and Sales Innovations and now as Head of Jelbi – the Mobility Platform and Hubs of BVG. He has 17 years of experience in digital product marketing and has held several executive roles on agency and client side such as Vice President Acquisition & Retention for Vivendi (Watchever). Jakob Michael holds a Double-Diploma of Media Culture Scientist and Diplôme de Maîtrise Information & Communication from the Bauhaus University Weimar and Université Lumière Lyon.

Stijn Vernaillen is a product designer who has been working on mobility and urban challenges from an early point in his career. He has done research on sustainable mobility, resilient cities, integration of smart grids with EVs, logistical optimalisations and packaging engineering. For the past 3 years he’s been working for the City of Antwerp under the Smart Ways to Antwerp project on setting up an open and distributed MaaS Ecosystem plus a digital backbone for the user-centric approach to mobility of Smart Ways to Antwerp. He’s actively involved in MaaS Alliance, ITS.be and other initiatives which help shape the MaaS Ecosystem on a regional and international level. Used to be an avid multimodalist but started to enjoy working from home. As a dad he’s also driven to push safer and more sustainable mobility solution. Despite working on tech and data, he’s a also a strong believer that the low-tech solution is often the smartest solution.