The two major challenges mankind has to face during the 21st century in the context of transportation are urbanization and CO_2 emissions. These two phenomena cause serious problems and bring along a strong need for the implementation of innovative and "smart" solutions in future cities. The substantial need for these solutions, however, can lead to interesting commercial opportunities for innovative companies. In the light of this trend development an innovation project, which was based on the lead user approach, was conducted by the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (E&I Institute) at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Wien) in cooperation with Kapsch TrafficCom AG (Kapsch). The latter is a member of the Kapsch Group, a worldwide renowned Austrian company. Kapsch operates in over 35 countries and is a leading international supplier of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Its core business is the development and supply of electronic toll collection (ETC) systems, and the technical and commercial operation of the latter. Finding radically new concepts and solutions is always a challenging task. However, the lead user method is an applicable tool to gain deeper insight into complex problems and to produce highly innovative ideas and solutions. The main goal of this research project was to find innovative solutions to decarbonise transportation of people and goods in "Smart Cities". Several important constraints have to be considered in connection to the underlying problem. Firstly, solutions must be commercially realizable by the year 2025. Secondly, commercial business models should be marketed on a B2G or B2B basis. Thirdly, the focus lies on cities with more than two million inhabitants. In addition, solutions must be scalable. Finally, any solution ought to lead to a reduction of CO~2 emission. A major difficulty for the conducted lead user method was the definition of the search field and the term "smart city". In general, there is no singular definition of what makes a city smart and there is also no clearly defined strategy which must be implemented in order to improve a city's smartness (Austrian Institute of Technology, 2011). Smart cities have several dimensions as outlined by the European Commission (2009): smart mobility, smart environment, smart governance, smart people, smart living and smart economy. While the interdependencies of these dimensions were only investigated in phase 1 of the lead user project, it was necessary to narrow down the search field so as to be able to find feasible concepts and solutions.
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