Ideas in Transit - Resources

During the project we will make available what we can that may be of help to you and others.

Something we did early on was to read up on what was known about:

Here's an extended summary of what we found:

Other summary documents from our work:

Innovators workshop - February 2009 [PDF] - This 5 page report summarises the outcome of a workshop held in London in February 2009. This event brought together 8 grassroots innovators in the transport sector to discuss barriers and enablers to the innovation process and their perceived measures of success. The report concludes with 5 main findings which cover issues such as funding, skills, and access to data.
ICTs and everyday mobility - May 2009 [PDF] - This 3 page report summarises work within the project which examined the ways in which information and communications technologies feature in the everyday mobile lives of part-time working mums, mobile business professionals and university students.
Support required by innovators - August 2009 [PDF] - This 4 page report summarises the results from in-depth interviews and a workshop with grassroots innovators in sustainable transport. The particular focus of this document is the support that is key for this type of innovation - i.e. that which is outside traditional R&D processes. The findings should be of particular interest to policy makers, sponsors of research/innovation, academia and transport data providers.

We have also developed a number of draft academic articles further reflecting what we have been learning from the ITS Observatory:

The emergent role of user innovation in reshaping passenger transport - consideration of the concept of innovation, examples of user innovation and discussion about whether this spells the prospect of a challenge to or transition in the regime of Intelligent Transport Systems
A troublesome transport challenge? Working round the school run. - considers why women's travel is troublesome both to the individual and society, exploring narratives of everyday travel from diary-interviews with eleven women in the Bristol and Bath area
The role of ICTs in everyday mobile lives - reports on a qualitative diary and interview study that explored the ways in which information and communications technologies are being used by students aged 18-28 and part time working mums
End user involvement in bottom up 'grassroots' innovation - reports on detailed interview and workshop methodology used to study the innovative process and practices of 16 novel, ICT-based innovations within transport, that have emerged from grass-roots (non top-down) initiatives
Bottom-up 'grassroots' innovation in transport: motivations, barriers and enablers - identification of the catalysts and motivations behind progressing a user innovation abd the barriers and enablers to an innovation flourishing

Please get in touch if you are interested in any of these articles.

Some innovative developments of our own:

2010 Icelandic Ash Cloud - ITO has created an Airspace Rebooted Video which shows the flights resuming across northern Europe in the wake of The Ash Cloud. The video shows what can be achieved with crowd collected open data as without it the video would not exist. ITO has also put together a time line of events of People's response to the Eyjafjallajokull Ash Cloud which details the way people communicated and tried to deal with the cancellation of flights over Northern Europe.
OSM Mapper - Created by ITO World, OSM Mapper is possibly the only tool that gives a visual representation of OpenStreetMap meta-data. Users can follow the progress of data over the last three years, check editor and how many changes they made in a session as well as filter the map data by its "tags". This allows for following of the progression of the OpenStreetMap project across the world.

Further project development links:

GeoVation: An open, social innovation network that uses geography - GeoVation is an open, social innovation network that encourages and supports innovation for social, economic and environmental benefit through the use of Geography
GeoVation Challenge - If you have a great idea that uses geography, take up the GeoVation Challenge and make your dream a reality! Post your ideas and ventures, provide useful comments to help others’ ideas and ventures, seek and offer help from others in the community. 400 hundred people like you have already joined the community and posted over 200 ideas and ventures. Over 50% of these are directly or indirectly transit related.