Developing a business innovation perspective of electric vehicle uptake: lessons from Milton Keynes' electric vehicle programme

Electrification of transport forms a major part of British policy for energy and climate change. The formation of the early market for Electric Vehicles (EVs) has been supported through consumer subsidies, regulatory support, and programmes for the deployment of electric vehicle charging infrastructure, but uptake does not seem to be proceeding at the rate needed for meeting policy objectives. The approach pursued by policy actors is consistent with the approach of Strategic Niche Management (SNM), which would call for the creation of protected spaces to facilitate the development of new sociotechnical configurations. The Plugged-in Programme (PiP) in Milton Keynes is an example of creating a protective space. A comparison of PiP and other case studies in the literature of sociotechnical transitions identified a gap in SNM that may shed light on the limitations of EV policy in the UK. Traditionally, SNM has been used to monitor and manage interventions in support of prototype or pre-production vehicles. In consequence, there is no precedent for its application in support of early market technologies. The market introduction of innovative technologies can trigger interrelated technological and behavioural changes, affecting the preferences of producers and consumers while altering the demand structure of the sector. However, SNM does not account for the patterns of use and demand implied in what remain largely technological templates for the future. This thesis begins to develop a framework for the analysis and management of early market strategic niches. Insights from a second discipline, that of social marketing, were sought to complement the analytical tools of SNM. Social marketing is useful for understanding the effect of behavioural and market factors on the adoption of innovative technologies. Social marketing provides a framework for analysing and influencing behaviour in socially beneficial directions. Behaviour and choice are modulated through the application of a marketing orientation, identifying and addressing needs and creating valuable offerings. This research is centred on organizational users of electric vehicles (EVs), and explores the effectiveness of the policy portfolio for addressing the needs of early adopters and for building an early market for EVs. Thematic analysis, a form of qualitative content analysis, is applied to evidence from documentary sources, participant observation and interviews with key organizational actors in the community of pioneering and prospective EV users. The analysis draws on concepts from SNM and social marketing to explore previously neglected forces affecting the early market for EVs, with particular focus on the increasing importance of market selection and the competition presented by an entrenched but socially undesirable incumbent. Contrary to the expectations of policy actors, financial incentives and infrastructure deployment have a limited impact on the choices made by organizational actors. This thesis shows that the processes of learning and embedding that take place within the niche need to be multidimensional. Before a choice can be made, pioneering and prospective adopters of EVs invest considerable effort in the collaborative construction of new patterns of use and demand. This process can be supported by empowering interventions that identify suitable applications (creating multiple sub-niches within the niche) and facilitate the co-construction of new, competitive configurations around them. The models and networks created through this multidimensional, collaborative process translate into capabilities that give distinct advantages to pioneering adopters, allowing them to expand beyond their original niche and outperform the incumbents in mainstream markets

Consuming the million-mile electric car

Unlike for many consumer products, there has been no strong environmental case for extending the life of internal combustion engine cars as the majority of their environmental impact is fuel consumed in use and not the energy and materials involved in manufacturing. Indeed, with improving fuel efficiency, product life extension is environmentally undesirable; older, less fuel-efficient cars need to be replaced by newer more fuel-efficient models. Electric vehicles (EVs) are predominantly considered environmentally beneficial by using an increasingly decarbonised fuel – electricity. However, LCA analyses show that EVs have substantial environmental impacts in their materials, manufacturing and disposal. The high ‘embedded’ environmental impacts of EVs fundamentally change the case for product life extension. Thus, product life extension is desirable for EVs and they are suited to it. While petrol and diesel cars have an average lifetime mileage of 124,000 miles (200,000 Kilometres), the case for the million-mile (1.6 million Kilometre) electric car appears strong. Although it may be technically possible to produce a million-mile EV, how will such vehicles be consumed given that the car consumption is complex, involving, for example, extracting use and symbolic value? In this contribution we explore the nature of the relationship between cars and the consumer that moves beyond technical and functional value to understand what form of access consumers require to an EV across its entire 50-year life. If such consumption aspects are overlooked then, even if the million-mile car is technically viable, it is unlikely to be adopted and the environmental benefits they may yield will be lost.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Exploring the epistemic politics of urban niche experiments

Urban experiments have been initiated in several locations to purposively initiate and shape transitions to more sustainable urban socio-technical systems, e.g. for energy, water, mobility. Although knowledges produced within such learning spaces are often presented as logical, technical and rational (Vanolo, 2013 ; Kitchin, 2014), the actors and mechanisms which shape decisions are far from obvious, involving cultures, power relations and multiple logics that are profoundly political (Machin, 2013). This research presents a case study founded in a phronetic perspective (Flyvbjerg, 2001; Avelino and Grin, 2017), unpacking the epistemological politics of an urban experiment taking place within a ‘smart city’ programme. A ‘smart transport’ application for mobile phones, ‘MotionMap’ was developed to transform the mobility system of Milton Keynes, an expanding city located 80 km to the north of London, UK. The case study recognises power relations and reveals how various actors engaged in the development of this application have further rendered the MK mobility socio-technical system an object of urban governance

Exploring smart city atmospheres: The case of Milton Keynes

Smart cities are rapidly becoming the main form of urban development initiated in response to calls to address certain ills such as unsustainable cities. Often presented as rational responses to such challenges, there are affective dimensions which are political and impact their development in various places. We investigate these affective dimensions by using the concept of atmospheres -collective affects arising from encounters between places, actors, materialities and (hi)stories. Our work builds on the premise that acceptance of smart city initiatives relies on their supporter’s ability to disseminate compelling stories about smart urban futures. Atmospheres matter here because the stories that can be credibly told are not arbitrary – to be believed, urban stories must be embedded in and coupled to the materialities and affects of their environment. The aim of this paper is to investigate the deliberate cultivation of atmospheres by actors with urban remits, revealing how such atmospheres can become impactful mechanisms for selectively rendering cities amenable or refractory to different stories about smart urban futures. An in-depth case study of the English new town of Milton Keynes is presented to illustrate how atmospheres have been cultivated to selectively resist or reinforce the stories through which the smart city agenda is advanced. Narratives about rationality and data-driven efficiency were translated into specific versions of the future. The resulting encounters gave rise to atmospheres of reception, anticipation, innovation and progress through which urban spaces were rendered selectively receptive to specific forms of smart development in pursuit of local, contextually defined goals

Exploring participatory visions of smart transport in Milton Keynes

This paper explores citizen concerns emerging in the design stage of MotionMap, a smart transport initiative developed in the context of a £16 million smart city programme. A city-wide sensing system integrated with other databases will provide real-time information about vehicular and pedestrian movement. The experience of a series of smart transport workshops in Milton Keynes suggests that citizens feel that they bear the cost of smart cities through potentially intrusive surveillance producing sacrifices in convenience and privacy, while the gains are captured by industrial and governmental actors. This distrust of surveillance through urban sensing systems is not inflexible. Such systems can gain legitimacy through a participatory approach where users legitimize the sensing system by taking an active role in providing transport data, as opposed to having it ‘harvested’ from them through passive or opportunistic mechanisms. Participatory approaches are challenging because users will engage only if the system can provide compelling benefits. A key contribution of this research comes from identifying that the benefits important to citizens are not necessarily measured in economic terms nor in terms of increased efficiency

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

Prevalence and attributable health burden of chronic respiratory diseases, 1990–2017: A systematic analysis for the global burden of disease study 2017

© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open Access article under the CC BY 4.0 license Background: Previous attempts to characterise the burden of chronic respiratory diseases have focused only on specific disease conditions, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or asthma. In this study, we aimed to characterise the burden of chronic respiratory diseases globally, providing a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis on geographical and time trends from 1990 to 2017. Methods: Using data from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2017, we estimated the prevalence, morbidity, and mortality attributable to chronic respiratory diseases through an analysis of deaths, disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs), and years of life lost (YLL) by GBD super-region, from 1990 to 2017, stratified by age and sex. Specific diseases analysed included asthma, COPD, interstitial lung disease and pulmonary sarcoidosis, pneumoconiosis, and other chronic respiratory diseases. We also assessed the contribution of risk factors (smoking, second-hand smoke, ambient particulate matter and ozone pollution, household air pollution from solid fuels, and occupational risks) to chronic respiratory disease-attributable DALYs. Findings: In 2017, 544·9 million people (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 506·9–584·8) worldwide had a chronic respiratory disease, representing an increase of 39·8% compared with 1990. Chronic respiratory disease prevalence showed wide variability across GBD super-regions, with the highest prevalence among both males and females in high-income regions, and the lowest prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia. The age-sex-specific prevalence of each chronic respiratory disease in 2017 was also highly variable geographically. Chronic respiratory diseases were the third leading cause of death in 2017 (7·0% [95% UI 6·8–7·2] of all deaths), behind cardiovascular diseases and neoplasms. Deaths due to chronic respiratory diseases numbered 3 914 196 (95% UI 3 790 578–4 044 819) in 2017, an increase of 18·0% since 1990, while total DALYs increased by 13·3%. However, when accounting for ageing and population growth, declines were observed in age-standardised prevalence (14·3% decrease), age-standardised death rates (42·6%), and age-standardised DALY rates (38·2%). In males and females, most chronic respiratory disease-attributable deaths and DALYs were due to COPD. In regional analyses, mortality rates from chronic respiratory diseases were greatest in south Asia and lowest in sub-Saharan Africa, also across both sexes. Notably, although absolute prevalence was lower in south Asia than in most other super-regions, YLLs due to chronic respiratory diseases across the subcontinent were the highest in the world. Death rates due to interstitial lung disease and pulmonary sarcoidosis were greater than those due to pneumoconiosis in all super-regions. Smoking was the leading risk factor for chronic respiratory disease-related disability across all regions for men. Among women, household air pollution from solid fuels was the predominant risk factor for chronic respiratory diseases in south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, while ambient particulate matter represented the leading risk factor in southeast Asia, east Asia, and Oceania, and in the Middle East and north Africa super-region. Interpretation: Our study shows that chronic respiratory diseases remain a leading cause of death and disability worldwide, with growth in absolute numbers but sharp declines in several age-standardised estimators since 1990. Premature mortality from chronic respiratory diseases seems to be highest in regions with less-resourced health systems on a per-capita basis. Funding: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Differential cross section measurements for the production of a W boson in association with jets in proton–proton collisions at √s = 7 TeV

Measurements are reported of differential cross sections for the production of a W boson, which decays into a muon and a neutrino, in association with jets, as a function of several variables, including the transverse momenta (pT) and pseudorapidities of the four leading jets, the scalar sum of jet transverse momenta (HT), and the difference in azimuthal angle between the directions of each jet and the muon. The data sample of pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV was collected with the CMS detector at the LHC and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 5.0 fb[superscript −1]. The measured cross sections are compared to predictions from Monte Carlo generators, MadGraph + pythia and sherpa, and to next-to-leading-order calculations from BlackHat + sherpa. The differential cross sections are found to be in agreement with the predictions, apart from the pT distributions of the leading jets at high pT values, the distributions of the HT at high-HT and low jet multiplicity, and the distribution of the difference in azimuthal angle between the leading jet and the muon at low values.United States. Dept. of EnergyNational Science Foundation (U.S.)Alfred P. Sloan Foundatio

Optimasi Portofolio Resiko Menggunakan Model Markowitz MVO Dikaitkan dengan Keterbatasan Manusia dalam Memprediksi Masa Depan dalam Perspektif Al-Qur`an

Risk portfolio on modern finance has become increasingly technical, requiring the use of sophisticated mathematical tools in both research and practice. Since companies cannot insure themselves completely against risk, as human incompetence in predicting the future precisely that written in Al-Quran surah Luqman verse 34, they have to manage it to yield an optimal portfolio. The objective here is to minimize the variance among all portfolios, or alternatively, to maximize expected return among all portfolios that has at least a certain expected return. Furthermore, this study focuses on optimizing risk portfolio so called Markowitz MVO (Mean-Variance Optimization). Some theoretical frameworks for analysis are arithmetic mean, geometric mean, variance, covariance, linear programming, and quadratic programming. Moreover, finding a minimum variance portfolio produces a convex quadratic programming, that is minimizing the objective function ðð¥with constraintsð ð 𥠥 ðandð´ð¥ = ð. The outcome of this research is the solution of optimal risk portofolio in some investments that could be finished smoothly using MATLAB R2007b software together with its graphic analysis