Understanding user innovation - Unanticipated applications of existing ITS

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Modern lifestyles and patterns of travel are increasingly permeated and supported by information technologies (IT). Our transport systems are similarly dependent increasingly upon IT to manage system capacity and the demands placed upon it. IT is the facilitator of opportunities to address present and future needs, desires and problems. The field of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) has traditionally looked to realise such opportunities through innovation that is commercially led (e.g. Satellite Navigation systems) or government led with commercial companies implementing systems to its specification through a tendering process (e.g. real-time information systems for bus services). This proposal stems from the contention that there may be another significant, but largely over-looked, source of innovation - specifically where users (people, organisations and businesses) are conceiving of uses of existing forms of IT and ITS in innovative ways and different contexts than those anticipated by their providers. Increasingly the producer/consumer model of the delivery of information services is giving way to a network mode where content and services are generated by users. By attempting to study and discover 'user innovations' there is the prospect of being able to identify, develop and exploit new opportunities for existing technologies and services to address challenges facing transport systems and users.This project will develop and apply an 'ITS Observatory' / a mixed method approach to looking for and examining creative behaviours being exhibited by transport system users. Research expertise in social psychology and human factors relating to IT will be combined with industry expertise in data and information generation, manipulation and visualisation to support advances in information services. The cataloguing of user innovations exposed by the Observatory will form the basis for identifying prospective pathways to commercial innovation and exploitation. Selected pathways will then be pursued within the project.