Images: Zag Daily
Poland has spent three decades building one of Europe’s fastest-growing economies. Its mobility sector, however, faces the challenge of turning the nation’s industrial and economic base into companies and players with greater visibility and reach across Europe.
The 2026 New Mobility Congress (KNM) in Katowice drew 7,500 delegates for a three-day summit on electrification, energy and urban innovation. Yet despite its forward-looking title, Central and Eastern Europe’s largest mobility forum shifted its focus away from future technologies to confront immediate operational challenges. Rather than focusing on robotaxis or eVTOLs, the conversation was dominated by more pressing, capital-intensive issues like regional grid capacity constraints and the upfront cost of commercial fleet electrification.
Artur Jop, Co-Founder and CEO of Polish urban logistics company VeloHub, sees that practical focus as characteristic of the country. Jop and his co-founder Adam Bilewicz have worked on cargo-bike logistics in Poland for years, including on the deployment of more than 100 cargo bikes for DPD Poland.
“Poland is, by nature, grounded and pragmatic,” Jop tells Zag Daily. “We haven’t had the resources to build the base needed to experiment with newer technology in the same way as Western Europe or the US.”
He views this pragmatism as a double-edged sword. While it shields local firms from expensive, speculative failures, it can also limit their long-term competitiveness by keeping them disconnected from global tech frontiers.
Polish companies excel at evaluating whether a technology can survive immediate day-to-day operations, he notes, whereas international mobility conferences and trends often get lost in “a positive cyberpunk vision of the world” that ignores local infrastructure realities.
“I just can’t imagine swarms of delivery drones flying overhead here delivering parcels every day,” Jop says. “We don’t have the regulation or the infrastructure for it at the moment.”
That does not mean the country lacks an innovation base, Jop emphasises. Poland has a substantial industrial economy and is increasingly connected to European research and innovation programmes. The question, he notes, is how effectively Polish companies can use those connections.
An economy built quickly
Jop’s perspective on the mobility sector is deeply rooted in Poland’s rapid post-communist economic trajectory.
The country’s post-1990 transition to a market economy, catalysed by the Balcerowicz reforms and accelerated by 2004 EU accession, triggered decades of aggressive economic expansion and heavy infrastructure investment. Jop argues that the sheer speed of this transformation continues to distort local perceptions of modernisation.
He describes the 1990s as a period of intense fascination with American-style capitalism, which left a complicated legacy regarding status and consumption.
“In Germany, taking children to school by cargo bike is a middle-class status symbol,” Jop explains. “In Poland, the equivalent status symbol is owning a car, even when that car has been bought on credit.”
A similar friction shapes Poland’s relationship with Brussels. Despite being one of the bloc’s largest recipients of cohesion funding, many domestic businesses still view European institutions with skepticism.
“The EU can still feel very Western Europe-centric to people here,” Jop notes. “Institutionally, I think companies from Western Europe have a much easier time finding and working with investors.”
This cultural alienation is now colliding with the hard infrastructure bottlenecks threatening Poland’s green transition. In 2025, the country’s Energy Regulatory Office recorded 4,897 grid-connection refusals, blocking a combined 107GW of requested capacity. The figures illustrate the pressure on the electricity network as new sources of demand compete for connections.
For smaller operators, however, the financial barriers hit long before the grid constraints.
“In some regions, mum-and-pop logistics shops are still fairly common, running outdated diesel vehicles they simply can’t afford to replace,” Jop says, arguing that these businesses can be overlooked when mobility policy is shaped around large fleet operators and technology companies.
Getting Polish companies into the European network
Jop argues that Poland needs to show it can make full use of the funding and networks available to it rather than relying on them indefinitely. He believes stronger links between businesses and institutions also need to be built locally.
Bridging the gap between regional enterprises and the broader European market is the primary mandate of EIT Urban Mobility, an EU-backed initiative that coordinates funding and strategic partnerships across cities, universities, and startups.
Its own investment documents identify Poland as an underrepresented EIT Regional Innovation Scheme (RIS) country within its portfolio, with the organisation seeking to increase participation from such markets.
Speaking to Zag Daily at KNM, Traian Urban, the organisation’s Regional Director for Innovation Hub East, noted that integration challenges often stem from institutional friction rather than local resistance to change. European programmes can be notoriously complex for smaller businesses to navigate, with administrative requirements and reporting structures that are rarely optimised for early-stage companies.
“We’re not obliging Polish or any local entities to change their behaviour,” Urban says. “But there are regulations and processes to follow that aren’t always suitable for a startup or small company in terms of reporting, paperwork, things a flexible startup environment wouldn’t normally require.”
EIT Urban Mobility is actively working to expand these connection points across Central and Eastern Europe. Urban observed that KNM’s predominantly Polish footprint reflects strong local municipal backing, but it also highlights practical hurdles such as language barriers.
“Many of the high-level figures here don’t speak a lot of English,” he says. “That makes internationalising more difficult because it often means they are less likely to attend international events.”
Urban emphasises that bridging this divide is critical for unearthing regional potential, given that EIT’s pan-European offices can “open doors for entities from Poland” by matching them with localised demands. “Markets are also at different stages of development,” he notes. “Companies in Spain are looking for something different than companies in Romania, for instance.”
For Jop, this isolation extends beyond administrative bottlenecks. He regularly encounters local projects with global commercial potential that fail to gain traction outside Poland, a phenomenon he attributes to a cultural aversion among domestic founders to showcase initiatives before they are completely flawless.
“I think that comes down to a mentality of ‘it’s either perfect or it’s not good enough’ with little in between,” he says. “A lot of good ideas stay at the pilot stage and never make it past that threshold.”
VeloHub’s own experience offers an example of what can happen when a Polish company does enter those networks. The company is participating in the Horizon Europe Nextlogic project, a 35-partner consortium working on urban logistics and sustainable mobility solutions across eight European cities.
Jop believes VeloHub’s previous work in Poland helped demonstrate that its ideas could be applied commercially, and adds that his time in the US changed his approach to self-promotion, although he still finds it difficult.
“I’d like to think it came down to prioritising function first, being useful and pragmatic rather than focused on form,” he says, “but it does help if you know how to walk the walk and talk the talk like they do elsewhere.”
While the European innovation framework is increasingly structured to widen participation from underrepresented regional markets, the ultimate objective for Poland’s mobility sector is twofold. It must elevate its proven domestic expertise onto the continental stage while concurrently resolving the acute funding and infrastructure constraints that limit what companies can build at home.
