Several mobility-related issues persist in and around urban areas. Autonomous vehicles promise substantial environmental, safety, and economic benefits but may also cause unintended adverse effects that stem from single-passenger mobility becoming more affordable and accessible. While using them for public transport (i.e., autonomous shuttles) can help avoid such downsides, there are many challenges to their adoption, particularly ones that are related to citizen acceptance and economic aspects. Based on a novel survey of Brussels' citizens, we provide insights from user opinions on last-mile autonomous shuttle services and analyze the effect of various attitudinal and socio-demographic factors affecting such acceptance. Our respondents exhibit an overall positive acceptance albeit with a limited willingness to pay for it. In addition, based on expert interviews, we provide a discussion on appropriate business models and policy recommendations to help ensure the timely adoption of AVs in Belgium that adapts to mobility needs and policy goals.

5G systems promise to enable autonomous vehicles by empowering road-, water-, and air-vehicles with ultra low latency communications and computing at edge in order to share and process data from multiple sensors. However, in order to realize such fully Connected and Automated Mobility (CAM) for cars, drones and vessels, a crucial intermediary step must be fully achieved: 5G-based tele-operated transport. In order to do so, the European project H2020 5G-Blueprint aims to design, test, and validate in real deployments a 5G-enabled tele-operated transport and its enabling functions in both a relevant and operational environment realised through cross-border trials on the road and on the water along 5G corridors in the Dutch and Belgian border area, resulting in a blueprint for future cooperation on 5G-enabled CAM between public, private and semi-private parties (e.g, ports), gaining new and innovative insights on the stringent particular requirements for safe CAM, on the architecture, on governance and relevant business models.

C-ITS safety use cases promise to reduce road accidents. However, deploying the necessary system elements that enable such use cases entails challenges in terms of value network coordination, return on investments in infrastructure and in-vehicle devices, and monetization of services. In short, this paper aims at contributing to overcome these economic challenges by (i) clarifying the overall value network and interactions amongst key stakeholders, (ii) proposing how to incentivise the fulfilment of bottleneck value network roles, (iii) providing recommendations on how to incentivise investments and the monetization of C-ITS services, and (iv) arguing for a data exchange and governance model based on regulatory and business model aspects.

This paper attempts to shed light on future 5G business models. First, it analyses how telecommunications business models may change with the adoption of 5G and network slicing technologies, emphasizing their impact on control and value aspects. Second, it reviews and extends current literature to describe and discuss six business model configurations for a future 5G context, focusing on the role of mobile network operators. For example, we propose a specific arrangement for socially valuable ecosystems such as smart cities. Overall, these models apply to diverse settings and will differ in terms of market concentration, the value propositions of connectivity service providers, and the implications for innovation and competition.

This paper analyses how innovation and business models are related in the case of immersive audiovisual services, with a focus on three distribution platforms: HTC’s Viveport, Facebook’s Oculus Home and Google’s YouTube VR. To do so, it first briefly discusses the issues at stake in terms of media innovation, in particular the fact that content innovation is often neglected or misunderstood. After briefly summarizing relevant previous work, it then applies the Business Model Matrix (Ballon, 2009) to these three cases. In particular, the cases are compared in terms of vertical integration, customer ownership, interoperability, revenue model, positioning, user involvement, and the role of content innovation. The paper concludes with a comparison of the cases. It expands the rapidly growing literature on media innovation by using a business model methodology, providing the first instance of an in-depth, structured comparison of immersive audiovisual services from a business point of view. It aims to fill a knowledge gap by dealing with a sector almost ignored by business or economic academic literature.

Transport sector is in the process of being rapidly and fundamentally reshaped by autonomous and collaborative driving technologies. This reshaping promises huge economic and social benefits as well as challenges in terms of developing and deploying secure and safe transportations systems, their smooth integration to social fabric. We have employed Policy Scan and Technology Strategy Design methodology in order to identify concrete societal expectations and problems and map them with mitigating technological availabilities in the domain of autonomous driving and smart mobility. Event Data Recorder for Autonomous Driving (EDR/AD) is an envisioned subsystem of a vehicular Controller Area Network which ensures the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data related to operation of a vehicle in order to permit recovery of exact situation following the occurrence of an event or on demand. The exact technical and regulatory requirements for the device are still in the development internationally, but it is clear that it will be included into vehicle type-approval requirements at UNECE level. We present an analysis of the context of the usage of the EDR/AD in collaborative intelligent transport systems, related security, data provenance and privacy, other regulatory and technical issues considering many interest groups and stakeholders involved. We present a concrete proposal for developing a EDR/AD proof of the concept prototype with clear market deployment potential and urge security researchers, vehicle manufacturers, and component suppliers to form a collaboration towards implementing important technology for making future autonomous vehicles more socially acceptable and legally compliant. Furthermore, EDR/AD technology, apart from its immediate use in autonomous driving and smart mobility domain has a potential to be extended to general autonomous robot and AI applications.

Increasingly accelerating technology advancement affects and disrupts almost all aspects of human society and civilization at large as we know it. Actually, this has been true since the technology started at the dawn of human society, yet the mere speed and magnitude of modern technology development brings about the situation where societies and economies have to adapt to the changing technological landscape as much as technologies have to integrate into the social fabric. The way to to achieve such integration in a changing and unpredictable world is to support the close interaction between the world of societal expectations and the world of technology. Policy Scan and Technology Strategy design methodology presented in this paper was developed precisely for the purpose of addressing specific types of 'ill-defined' problems in terms of observing, analyzing and integrating technology developments and availabilities with policy requirements, social governance and societal expectations. The methodology consists of conceptual tools and methods for developing concrete actions and products for guiding technology adoption for social change. It is geared towards increasingly complex and uncertain situations where existing analysis and problem solving methods often fail due to many non-linearities inherent in the social and technology worlds and, especially, at their area of their inter intersection. The development of the methodology followed the grounded theory construction process which requires a close relation to a specific context of an application domain, determined by actual interaction between the worlds of societal problems and technology. The chosen application domain of this research is the intersection of smart mobility problematics and opportunities, the rising autonomous driving technology, data privacy, provenance and security challenges, policies and legislation.

This chapter discusses the changes in the overall political and regulatory framework towards the creation of a European Information and Knowledge society. It focuses on the European Union (EU) as a Principal political driving force behind the transformations the Information and Communication Technologies sector went through from the 1980s onwards, encompassing both the audiovisual and telecommunications sector. The chapter provides the actors involved in policy-making at EU level, the rationale behind their actions and the means they have to implement an overall policy framework. The process of completing the Single European market and liberalising protected sectors such as telecoms or broadcasting has been anything but even or uniform, whether evaluated across the last two decades or comparing the relevant sectors. In the meanwhile, the Commission had begun to shift its focus from 'old' telecommunications policies to broader questions of regulation of Information and Communication Technologies.

This chapter discusses standards and innovation in the context of business models: how firms and industries create new ways of capturing value from products and services. Business model development encompasses all manner of direct and neighboring opportunities for creating new markets and creating streams of revenue for new products. Business modelling itself conforms quite well to any definition of innovation. Using the example of digital radio broadcasting, the authors show how the development of standards was also part of the process of working out various business models to expand the commercial possibilities of this technology, thus integrating the standardization and innovation processes in a particularly direct way.

Today’s media industry is characterized by disruptive changes and business models have been acknowledged as a driving force for success. Current business model research manages only to grasp static descriptions while in reality media managers are struggling with the dynamics of the industry. This article aims to close this gap by investigating a new paradigm of online media business models. Based on three video game case studies of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game genre, this article explores a novel theoretical approach to explain the changes that can be made within business models. The article highlights the importance of changing processes within online media business models and emphasises that the video game sector is at the forefront of business innovation. Finally, it demonstrates that online media business model change is in a trade-off paradigm between capturing or offering potentially higher value per player vs. accessing a potentially larger player-base.

The Creative Ring (CR) is a conceptual composition, integration and interworking of a number of physical and logical components, functionalities, abstractions and requirements. It is thus proposed as a new experimental community and platform for sharing and co-creating creative and innovative content and activities all over and outside Europe, using real-life Future Internet infrastructures, technologies and networks. As envisaged by the SPECIFI project, CR is to form a growing meshed network featuring and exploiting the above presented components interconnected at technical and community levels.

This paper investigates the gap between research into Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA), and the standardization of these technologies, as well as ways in which coordination of standardization activities between EU funded research projects might help bridge this gap. Concretely, it first discusses the current state of standardization in CR and DSA, as well as the need for a coordinated approach to DSA standardization among European projects. It subsequently provides a short overview of the DSA and CR research landscape in Europe and briefly describes the objectives of the Cognitive Radio Standardization Initiative (CRS-i). The following sections on the paper then focus on a survey which was conducted among the 26 currently funded, Radio Access and Spectrum related EU projects, with specific analysis also performed for the CR and DSA related sub-cluster of projects. This survey provides insight into projects' current standardization activities and collaboration methods, as well as opportunities and bottlenecks for collaboration in standardization. The paper concludes that the coordination of standardization efforts, as well as specific instruments to enable the standardization of research results beyond the project lifetime, are desirable if Europe is to play a role in the global standardization of CR and DSA. Based on the survey and on close interactions with RAS cluster projects, the paper finally proposes a number of concrete coordination trajectories.