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Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - CIPTEC (Collective Innovation for Public Transport in European Cities)

Teaser

CIPTEC (Collective Innovation for Public Transport in European Cities) is an EU Horizon 2020 project, addressing the challenge for “Smart, Green and Integrated Transport” and a CIVITAS knowledge generating project in the area of “Tackling urban congestion”. The main...

Summary

CIPTEC (Collective Innovation for Public Transport in European Cities) is an EU Horizon 2020 project, addressing the challenge for “Smart, Green and Integrated Transport” and a CIVITAS knowledge generating project in the area of “Tackling urban congestion”. The main aim of the project was to bring new thinking and innovative solutions for Public Transport, creating a favourable environment for the growth of Public Transport. The project started on May of 2015 and ran for 36 months. CIPTEC is articulated in three phases. More specifically, the first phase regards the current innovation, the second one regards the future innovation and the third one focuses on the capitalization of current and future innovation.

In order to deliver its promise to assist the EU Urban Public Transport to grow, CIPTEC had set the following five strategic research and innovation objectives as stated in the proposal:
- To gather and analyse customer intelligence improving the understanding of Urban Public Transport demand
- Collect market intelligence to allow the demystifying of the urban public transport supply
- Advanced motivational insights undergoing transport related behavior
- Mapping and identification of promising innovative approaches and co-creation of novel integrated solutions and business models for urban PT
- Translation, validation and capitalization of results through an extended platform of motivated stakeholders for PT innovation

Work performed

During the first phase of the CIPTEC project, an analysis of current market and social trends that might influence public transport within the next years has been conducted. CIPTEC investigated the specific needs of users and potential users of Public Transport systems. This analysis was performed by means of a rigorous and in-depth review of the literature on different types of Public Transport customers groups and their needs. A large number of interviews was conducted with representatives of Authorities and Operators, as well as with experts (mainly, but not exclusively with a transport related background). Another important research was the mapping and profiling of urban public transport supply. With the aid of an extensive survey, needs of public transport bodies were mapped. The first phase ended with the recording and evaluation of existing innovative services, coming not only from the public transport sector, but also from other transport and business sectors.

The main goal of the second phase was the development of innovative concepts in the public transport sector by means of collective intelligence, such as crowdsourcing campaigns and co-creation workshops, as well as the implementation of advanced marketing research methods. An extensive review of the collective innovation methods was carried out. After that, a crowdsourcing platform was developed, in order to enable the collection of new and innovative ideas. Moreover, two co-creation workshops and one crowdsourcing campaign were organised in four preselected European urban areas, with different business contexts. A wider crowdsourcing campaign has also been launched at a European level. For exploitation and sustainability purposes, the crowdsourcing platform has been released as open source. A website dedicated to the exploitation of the platform and to the offering of services related to crowdsourcing has been developed. The concepts derived have been (i) quantitatively and (ii) qualitatively (evaluation workshop with experts) evaluated. The second phase was concluded with the advanced marketing research methods that were used for ranking the innovations and identifying hidden groups of PT users. Additionally, behavioural insights have been tested both in lab and field environment, by taking into account the fact that preferences and attitudes can often be poor predictors of behaviour. In short, CIPTEC tested the potential of social labelling to increase people’s actual use of the bus in two areas (Rotterdam and Siena).

During the third phase of the project, the Toolbox for Public Transport Innovation has been designed and the potential of social entrepreneurship in the Public Transport sector was investigated through special workshops with experts on the field. The CIPTEC Toolbox is a tool that acts as the “synthesis” for the whole project. It includes the most important innovative concepts and the Innovation Flow which introduces all methodologies that were used in the project. Toolbox was tested by preparing three “model” strategy plans for innovation introduction and implementation. Furthermore, CIPTEC explored the potential of filling in the gap among supply and demand by activating the group of social entrepreneurs and innovators by implementing four participatory workshops at local level and one at European level. The third phase of CIPTEC was concluded with the preparation of comprehensive policy recommendations.

Final results

EU Research and development has produced a series of high potential innovations in various areas of interest. CIPTEC introduced a large mapping exercise to identify and structure the landscape of available innovative concepts and analyzed their potential for assisting PT urban transport. Useful innovations could also be found outside the strict public transport domain so CIPTEC exploration has been extended to adjacent fields, delivering a full portfolio of selected innovations. CIPTEC launched a collective intelligence framework to generate new innovative concepts. We harnessed the power of crowdsourcing to co-devise new ideas and we used co-creation workshops. The outcome of these methods was analysed contributing to the better understanding of the customers’ intelligence.

In the context of CIPTEC, a comprehensive exploration of the preferences of different PT user segments, in general and regarding the most promising innovative concepts relevant to PT growth has been conducted. This provided useful insight on which are the critical innovations and for which users’ group, enhancing this way the acceptability and diffusion of these concepts and at the same time avoiding redundant development costs. This process took place with the aid of state-of-the art preference analytics (Advanced Conjoint Analysis). Moreover, CBC Latent Class estimation has been used to reveal hidden user groups and correspond each group to the most relevant innovations to them.

In many of the cases, EU projects attempt to understand the consumer producing results that are often descriptive and contribute little dynamic value (e.g. how to change behaviour). This inefficiency is amplified by the fact that behaviours that have an environmental or ethical flavour, such as transport-modal decisions, suffer from an even larger intention-behaviour gap. With the use of experimental consumer research to conceptualize and analyze the incentives behind transport behavioral change, especially with regard to new innovative solutions, CIPTEC moved beyond mere preferences and attitudes – often poor predictors of behavior – and tried to alleviate the behavior change.

Lastly but certainly not least, we wanted to ensure the reach of our results and their transferability to the actual urban context where they are most needed. New concepts cannot be enforced but they can be supported by means of creating stakeholder engagement. CIPTEC tried something new: next to the typical transport players we invited and worked with an unexpected one – the social entrepreneurs.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.ciptec.eu.