Bottom-up grassroots innovation in transport: motivations, barriers and enablers

This article was published in the journal, Transportation Planning and Technology [© Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03081060.2012.680820There is a growing phenomenon of ‘grassroots’ innovation, i.e. that triggered by individual users or communities (physical or virtual) seeking a solution to a personal or societal problem. This has great potential as a new source of sustainable transport innovations, but has been received little attention to date. This study conducted 16 in-depth interviews and a workshop with grassroots innovators in transport. A detailed thematic analysis of the interview data identified: catalysts for the idea and the motivation behind its pursuit; the barriers experienced (those that were overcome and those that were not); and the enablers that permitted the innovations to continue and to flourish. The paper concludes by identifying the conditions that need to exist for such innovations to be created, developed and exploited in order that their potential for increasing the sustainability of the transport system can be fulfilled

Making things happen : a model of proactive motivation

Being proactive is about making things happen, anticipating and preventing problems, and seizing opportunities. It involves self-initiated efforts to bring about change in the work environment and/or oneself to achieve a different future. The authors develop existing perspectives on this topic by identifying proactivity as a goal-driven process involving both the setting of a proactive goal (proactive goal generation) and striving to achieve that proactive goal (proactive goal striving). The authors identify a range of proactive goals that individuals can pursue in organizations. These vary on two dimensions: the future they aim to bring about (achieving a better personal fit within one’s work environment, improving the organization’s internal functioning, or enhancing the organization’s strategic fit with its environment) and whether the self or situation is being changed. The authors then identify “can do,” “reason to,” and “energized to” motivational states that prompt proactive goal generation and sustain goal striving. Can do motivation arises from perceptions of self-efficacy, control, and (low) cost. Reason to motivation relates to why someone is proactive, including reasons flowing from intrinsic, integrated, and identified motivation. Energized to motivation refers to activated positive affective states that prompt proactive goal processes. The authors suggest more distal antecedents, including individual differences (e.g., personality, values, knowledge and ability) as well as contextual variations in leadership, work design, and interpersonal climate, that influence the proactive motivational states and thereby boost or inhibit proactive goal processes. Finally, the authors summarize priorities for future researc

Community-based Innovation Among Elite Orienteers

We have studied a form of community innovation within the sport of orienteering, which in the Nordic countries consist of a closely knit group with a strong sense of community. This study shows how the processes for developing new technologies are driven by a strong sense of idealism, with little or no commercial motivation. Thus, this represents a kind of community development and sharing with a number of unique characteristics. While the community is central to participants’ endeavours of developing their systems, the participants are not representative of the typical member. On the contrary, they are examples of a minority that put in significant efforts of contributing to the larger group. What we argue is unique about the case we have presented is that the technology development starts out from a few number of highly motivated individuals that through limited collaboration with others builds technologies that get extensive proliferation and use within the communit

Two’s company, three’s a crowd: a case study of crowdsourcing software development

Crowdsourcing is an emerging and promising approach which involves delegating a variety of tasks to an unknown workforce— the crowd. Crowdsourcing has been applied quite successfully in various contexts from basic tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk to solving complex industry problems, e.g. InnoCentive. Companies are increasingly using crowdsourcing to accomplish specific software development tasks. However, very little research exists on this specific topic. This paper presents an in-depth industry case study of crowdsourcing software development at a multinational corporation. Our case study highlights a number of challenges that arise when crowdsourcing software development. For example, the crowdsourcing development process is essentially a waterfall model and this must eventually be integrated with the agile approach used by the company. Crowdsourcing works better for specific software development tasks that are less complex and stand-alone without interdependencies. The development cost was much greater than originally expected, overhead in terms of company effort to prepare specifications and answer crowdsourcing community queries was much greater, and the time-scale to complete contests, review submissions and resolve quality issues was significant. Finally, quality issues were pushed later in the lifecycle given the lengthy process necessary to identify and resolve quality issues. Given the emphasis in software engineering on identifying bugs as early as possible, this is quite problematic

Complex Product Form Generation in Industrial Design: A Bookshelf Based on Voronoi Diagrams

Complex product form generation methods have rarely been used within the field of industrial design. The difficulty in their use is mainly linked to constraints – such as functionality, production and cost – that apply to most products. By cou-pling a mathematically described morphology to an optimisation system, it may be possible to generate a complex product form, compliant with engineering and pro-duction constraints. In this paper we apply this general approach to the designing of a bookshelf whose structure is based on Voronoi diagrams. The algorithm be-hind the developed application used here is based on a prior work submitted else-where [1], adapted to the bookshelf problem. This second example of product form generation, which includes specific constraints, confirms the relevance of the general approach. The handling of complex morphologies is not straightforward. Consequently, an explorative study on that theme has been performed. A user interface has been de-veloped that allows for designing a bookshelf based on Voronoi diagrams. The user interface was subsequently tested by peer designers. The results suggest that user attitudes diverge: one faction preferred maximum freedom of creation, that is, maximum control of the form creation process; the other faction wanted the appli-cation to generate a bookshelf based on their functional needs (e.g. adapt to the number and types of objects to be stored) and would ask for a “surprise me” effect for the final solution. [1] Nordin A, Hopf A, Motte D, Bjärnemo R, Eckhardt C-C (2009) Using genetic algorithms and Voronoi diagrams in product design. Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering - JCISE, submitted

Is the Public Motivated to Engage in Open Data Innovation?

Part 3: Policy and StakeholdersInternational audienceGovernments aim to increase democracy by engaging the public in using open data to develop mobile apps and citizen services. They make information available (open data) and organize innovation contests to stimulate innovation with the goal to make new services available for the public to use. But will the public take on the challenge to both develop and provide services to each other? In this paper we use a case study from public transportation to investigate the motivation for individuals and teams to participate in innovation contests. The results show that the motivation for participating is primarily related to fun and enjoyment. We argue that in order to better meet the goals of open data innovation, governments need to follow through the full service innovation cycle and also care for making citizen coproduction in the execution and monitoring phases fun and enjoyable. Currently there is little chance for participants to make profit on a competitive market so governments need to provide other mechanisms to ensure service provisioning. For future research it is suggested to investigate how the later stages of open data innovation can be supported in order to meet the overall goals of open data innovation