Sometimes you need to practice what you preach. This was the order of the day for PoliVisu’s latest consortium meeting in Issy-les-Moulineaux, Paris (29th and 30th January 2020). With one year to go until the end of the project, the imperative was on generating a thorough evaluation process for the projects final results and ensuring lasting products and services for the European market. An especially important topic for 21c as leader of the Communications and Dissemination work stream.
Co-design, however, is easier said than done. Transforming the thinking of a bunch of researchers and technologists into that of a ‘marketer’ was quite a challenge. However, thanks to group role play on the first day all participants were soon acting like CEO’s, thinking outside the box to help identify any new 'sales' opportunities missed in previous business planning exercises. In groups teams defined early market solutions and visionary adopters as well as mainstream market products and customers, as well as actions to measure impact and KPIs. The outcomes segwayed neatly into commercialisation discussions with the main solution owners. It was agreed that proof-of-concepts have been achieved so the focus in year 3 of the project must switch to replicability and scalability.
The second day of the meeting saw the consortium meet with senior decision makers from the City Administration introducing them to the latest PoliVisu developments and soliciting their feedback on the use of the Issy traffic dashboard which utilises floating car data to provide information on speed, volumes, flow of traffic and time lost due to congestion. Reviewing what happens during extreme events such as a strike or heavy snow helps city managers review the impact on individual roads and make appropriate contingency plans for similar future events. Further discussions with local SMEs working with similar data hopes to push innovation further and find new positive policy measures to reduce traffic on the roads.
21c was represented at the meeting by Susie Ruston McAleer.