Roadmaps to Utopia: Tales of the Smart City

Notions of the Smart City are pervasive in urban development discourses. Various frameworks for the development of smart cities, often conceptualized as roadmaps, make a number of implicit claims about how smart city projects proceed but the legitimacy of those claims is unclear. This paper begins to address this gap in knowledge. We explore the development of a smart transport application, MotionMap, in the context of a £16M smart city programme taking place in Milton Keynes, UK. We examine how the idealized smart city narrative was locally inflected, and discuss the differences between the narrative and the processes and outcomes observed in Milton Keynes. The research shows that the vision of data-driven efficiency outlined in the roadmaps is not universally compelling, and that different approaches to the sensing and optimization of urban flows have potential for empowering or disempowering different actors. Roadmaps tend to emphasize the importance of delivering quick practical results. However, the benefits observed in Milton Keynes did not come from quick technical fixes but from a smart city narrative that reinforced existing city branding, mobilizing a growing network of actors towards the development of a smart region. Further research is needed to investigate this and other smart city developments, the significance of different smart city narratives, and how power relationships are reinforced and constructed through them

Framework for the Integration of Service and Technology Strategies

Organised by: Cranfield UniversityAfter sales service is a highly profitable business for manufacturers of technology-driven products. Due to this fact competitors want to share in high profit margins. At the same time after sales business has to deal with an increasing range of variants of products and technologies, shorter life cycles and changing customer demands. In spite of these manifold challenges, often neither after sales departments are involved in the early product development stage nor are customer demands and technical parameters considered in the service development processes entirely. Therefore an integration of service and technology strategies is necessary. This paper presents a framework for this integration that visualises the complex interdependencies and interfaces between service as well as product and motor vehicle workshop technologies.Mori Seiki – The Machine Tool Compan

e-Learning research: emerging issues?

e-Learning research is an expanding and diversifying field of study. Specialist research units and departments proliferate. Postgraduate courses recruit well in the UK and overseas, with an increasing focus on critical and research-based aspects of the field, as well as the more obvious professional development requirements. Following this years launch of a National e-Learning Research Centre, it is timely to debate what the field of study should be prioritising for the future. This discussion piece suggests that the focus should fall on questions that are both clear and tractable for researchers, and likely to have a real impact on learners and practitioners. Suggested questions are based on early findings from a series of JISC-funded projects on e-learning and pedagogy

Digital Preservation Services : State of the Art Analysis

Research report funded by the DC-NET project.An overview of the state of the art in service provision for digital preservation and curation. Its focus is on the areas where bridging the gaps is needed between e-Infrastructures and efficient and forward-looking digital preservation services. Based on a desktop study and a rapid analysis of some 190 currently available tools and services for digital preservation, the deliverable provides a high-level view on the range of instruments currently on offer to support various functions within a preservation system.European Commission, FP7peer-reviewe

Future scenarios to inspire innovation

In recent years and accelerated by the economic and financial crisis, complex global issues have moved to the forefront of policy making. These grand challenges require policy makers to address a variety of interrelated issues, which are built upon yet uncoordinated and dispersed bodies of knowledge. Due to the social dynamics of innovation, new socio-technical subsystems are emerging, however there is lack of exploitation of innovative solutions. In this paper we argue that issues of how knowledge is represented can have a part in this lack of exploitation. For example, when drivers of change are not only multiple but also mutable, it is not sensible to extrapolate the future from data and relationships of the past. This paper investigates ways in which futures thinking can be used as a tool for inspiring actions and structures that address the grand challenges. By analysing several scenario cases, elements of good practice and principles on how to strengthen innovation systems through future scenarios are identified. This is needed because innovation itself needs to be oriented along more sustainable pathways enabling transformations of socio-technical systems

Strategic standardisation of smart systems: A roadmapping process in support of innovation

With increasing awareness among policymakers and other stakeholders of the importance of standards in supporting innovation, many national governments and standards organisations are taking strategic foresight approaches to standardisation . This is especially the case for ICT-based ‘smart systems’, where an increasing number of different technologies and systems are interconnected to each other, involving a complex variety of actors. Roadmapping is a widely used tool to support such strategic policy processes, yet there remain significant challenges in terms of structuring and managing roadmapping exercises. This paper proposes a systematic process of managing roadmapping practices to develop effective strategies for standardisation in support of innovation. Based on literature regarding public-level strategy roadmaps and reviews of existing standardisation roadmapping exercises, a more systematic process has been developed, incorporating activities and tools to address increased challenges associated with standardisation of such complex areas. Findings of the research not only provide guidance on how roadmapping processes can be structured and organised to more effectively address standardisation issues in innovation strategies for smart systems, but also highlight policy implications, including potential roles for government in supporting standardisation efforts.The authors would like to thank Gatsby Charitable Foundation and Samsung Scholarship Foundation for their financial support, and all interviewees for sharing their knowledge and experiences, which provided invaluable insight for the research. Thanks are also due to two anonymous reviewers who provided constructive feedback and suggestions, which made the paper much stronger than before.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2016.04.01

Social Media Roadmaps. Exploring the futures triggered by social media.

Social media refers to a combination of three elements: content, user communities and Web 2.0 technologies. This foresight report presents six roadmaps of the anticipated developments of social media in three themes: society, companies, and local environment. One of the roadmaps, the meta-roadmap, is the synthesis of them all. The society sub-roadmap explores societal participation through communities. There are three sub-roadmaps relating to companies: interacting with companies through communities, social media in work environment, and social media enhanced shopping. The local environment sub-roadmap looks at social media in local environment. The roadmapping process was carried out through two workshops at VTT. The results of the report are crystallized into five main development lines triggered by social media. First development line is transparency referring to its increasing role in society, both with positive and negative consequences. The second development line is the rise of ubiquitous participatory communication model. This refers to an increase of two-directional and community-based interactivity in every field, where it has some added value. The third development is reflexive empowerment. This refers to the role of social media as an enabler of grass-root community collaboration. The fourth development line is the duality personalization/fragmentation vs. mass effects/integration. Personalization /fragmentation emphasises the tailoring of the web services and content. This development is counterweighted by mass effects/integration, like the formation of super-nodes in the web. The fifth development line is the new relations of physical and virtual worlds. This development line highlights the idea that practices induced by social media, e.g. communication, participation, co-creation, feedback and rating, will get more common in daily environment, and that virtual and physical worlds will be more and more interlinked.</p

Mapping and analysing prospective technologies for learning – Results from a consultation with European stakeholders and roadmaps for policy action

EU policies call for the strengthening of Europe’s innovative capacity and it is considered that the modernisation of Education and Training systems and technologies for learning will be a key enabler of educational innovation and change. This report brings evidence to the debate about the technologies that are expected to play a decisive role in shaping future learning strategies in the short to medium term (5-10 years from now) in three main learning domains: formal education and training; work-place and work-related learning; re-skilling and up-skilling strategies in a lifelong-learning continuum. This is the final report of the study ‘Mapping and analysing prospective technologies for learning (MATEL)' carried out by the MENON Network EEIG on behalf of the European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Institute for Prospective Technological Studies. The report synthesises the main messages gathered from the three phases of the study: online consultation, state-of-the-art analysis and a roadmapping workshop. Eight technology clusters and a set of related key technologies that can enable learning innovation and educational change were identified. A number of these technologies were analysed to highlight their current and potential use in education, the relevant market trends and ongoing policy initiatives. Three roadmaps, one for each learning domain, were developed. These identified long-term goals and specific objectives for educational change, which in turn led to recommendations on the immediate strategies and actions to be undertaken by policy and decision makers.JRC.J.3-Information Societ

Corporate Foresight : A Systematic Literature Review and Future Research trajectories

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Towards an Integration of the Lean Enterprise System, Total Quality Management, Six Sigma and Related Enterprise Process Improvement Methods

The lean enterprise system, total quality management, six sigma, theory of constraints, agile manufacturing, and business process reengineering have been introduced as universally applicable best methods to improve the performance of enterprise operations through continuous process improvement and systemic planned enterprise change. Generally speaking, they represent practice-based, rather than theory-grounded, methods with common roots in manufacturing. Most of the literature on them is descriptive and prescriptive, aimed largely at a practitioner audience. Despite certain differences among them, they potentially complement each other in important ways. The lean enterprise system, total quality management and six sigma, in particular, are tightly interconnected as highly complementary approaches and can be brought together to define a first-approximation “core” integrated management system, with the lean enterprise system serving as the central organizing framework. Specific elements of the other approaches can be selectively incorporated into the “core” enterprise system to enrich its effectiveness. Concrete theoretical and computational developments in the future through an interdisciplinary research agenda centered on the design and development of networked enterprises as complex adaptive socio-technical systems, as well as the creation of a readily accessible observatory of evidence-based management practices, would represent important steps forward