Skip to main content

Terminology

Mistra SAMS is a transdisciplinary research programme which brings together researchers and practicioners from various fields that all have their own nomenclature. To facilitate collaboration, Mistra SAMS has defined some core concepts, and further terminology will be added as needed.

Avoid - Shift - Improve

Mistra SAMS is underpinned by an understanding that the transformation to a sustainable transport system needs to be based on three main types of measures, summarized through the concepts avoid, shift and improve, which are defined as follows (UN, 2016, p. 16):
● Avoid: Unnecessary travel or transport is avoided, and improved systems are supported, for instance by more integrated urban planning, transport-demand management, and digitally supported accessibility (i.e. distance working at home or local co-working hubs, home-delivery services etc).
● Shift: Initiatives for promoting a broad shift to more efficient and environmentally friendly forms of transport. This means that the use of individual cars is to be replaced to a significant extent by combinations of walking, cycling, public transport and other forms of shared mobility.
● Improve: The environmental performance of existing means of transport is improved through technological, operational, regulatory or pricing and/or infrastructure measures.

Accessibility service innovations

Accessibility service innovations refer to new ways of configuring or re-configuring services in ways that enable or facilitate access to activities and functions in daily life (i.e. activities related to work, school, leisure, provision of daily goods). The ASIs that are in focus in this programme are: Un-travel (remote meetings, remote office, local supplies), new Scheduled transport services (digital innovations in bus, train, timetable operated), Self-organized services (private vehicle, rentalcar, poolcar, borrowbike) and On-demand services (innovations in taxi, shuttle service, autonomous vehicles).

Living Lab

Following Bergvall-Kåreborn et al. (2009)  Mistra SAMS defines Living Labs as follows. “(A) Living Lab is a gathering of public–private partnerships in which businesses, researchers, authorities, and citizens work together for the creation, validation, and test of new services, business ideas, markets, and technologies in real-life contexts. The purpose of a Living Lab is to create a shared arena in which digital services, processes, and new ways of working can be developed and tested with user representatives and researchers.”

Thus a Living Lab is an arena in which businesses, authorities, citizens and other stakeholders take active part in an innovation process by “stimulating and challenging” on-going research and development.

Multi-sided platforms (MSDP)

Multi-sided platforms are technologies, products or services that create value by enabling direct interactions between two or more customer or participant groups. Examples are the Uber app (connects drivers and passengers), Airbnb (connects dwelling owners and renters), and eBay (connects buyers and sellers) (Hagiu, 2014).

A successful MSDP is operated by a trustworthy supplier that provide services for the participants such as agreements between users, producers and platform owner, payment mechanism, security, integrity, social platform, inclusiveness, tickets, etc. In our case services is rendered both from the platform as well as from the users and producers of ASIs. Many emergent MSDPs help individual actors to optimize their accessibility and mobility but seldom with multi-modal offerings or any concern about the environment and without optimizing the use of infrastructure (Gullberg, 2015) .

Disruptive innovations

Disruptive innovations are new services or products that have the potential - individually or collectively - to disturb and transform existing ways of thinking, markets and value networks (Bower and Christensen 1995 ; Christensen et al 2015) . Disruptive innovations often have significant societal impact by providing new groups of users with access to products or services that historically have only been accessible to relatively few consumers. They thus disrupt prevailing consumer behaviors and habits in major ways (Markides 2006) , while often leading to the emergence of new markets or public services.