Public Transport has a mountain of challenges to surpass in order to play an even more decisive role in combating congestion. A shift towards a more user-centred marketing approach can be beneficial but the PT has to transcend beyond an outdated recipe of “conventional marketing for transport suppliers”. Mimicking commercial practices and trying to apply unsteady service paradigms in the transport public sector is not only naive, it is risky and unsustainably expensive.
We put forward an integrated approach which draws on the best ideas from marketing (customer orientation, marketing research, consumer intelligence), consumer behaviour (advanced motivational research, behavioural experimentation), innovation (crowdsourcing, collective intelligence, co-creation and co-design of new ideas, fusion of business concepts with social innovation), evaluation (socioeconomic, technological and ethical assessment) and co-exploitation within a wider than usual stakeholder platform attacking the challenges that do not favour the public transport “environment”.
CIPTEC abandons the myopic approach of looking at one pressure area assuming that the rest will fall into place – we look at urban transport as an environment of systemic interaction, dependency and synergy. It is under this light that we introduce a set of subtle disruptive ideas. We study the demand side and how its needs are affected by the continuous storm of change but we take a close look to the supply in an attempt to demystify their needs and understand the challenges they face tackling the same changes. We dig out and map promising existing innovation from PT and adjacent fields but we also put forth a collective intelligence subprogram to crowdsource and co-produce novel approaches to tackle underserved needs. We survey public transport users to appreciate the finer differences in preferences for the promising innovations but we dig deeper looking for motivation triggers able to achieve natural behaviour change – not only in the lab but in real life. We provide a translation-in-a-box of our results but we don’t wait for stakeholders to use them; we work with them to motivate and apply these insights into concrete street-action. We invite the broader community to cooperate along the value chain but we bring along an unexpected ally – social entrepreneurs – to build and apply disruptive models of sustainable and replicable value.
Our team is set to provide the scientific evidence and innovative tools to prove that we don’t need a big wallet to achieve growth in the European public transport and help the sector revamp its ambition.