We are hosting an initial workshop where a range of businesses within transportation and mobility will share and debate the challenges and opportunities that they face in adopting Digitally Enhanced Advanced Services (DEAS).

DEAS are a cluster of high-value disruptive business models. They focus on delivering ‘outcomes’ to customers rather simply selling a product – for example in manufacturing it’s about customers ‘buying a hole’ rather than ‘buying a drill’, in transport ‘buying mobility’ rather than ‘buying a car’, and in financial service ‘buying assurance’ rather than buying insurance’. Pioneering examples of advanced services exist in industry; Rolls-Royce sell ‘power-by-the-hour’ to airlines rather than just jet engines, Alstom’s Train Life Services sell ‘passenger movement’ rather than just trains. These exploit digital innovations and embrace society’s increasing appetite for services, and help to deliver business growth, productivity and resilience.

Our vision is that the UK should be the internationally leading research and practice hub for the innovation of DEAS. To support this ambition the EPSRC has made an award of £1.4M over three years to create a network of businesses and researchers to enable a coordinated programme of research to be designed and piloted. Foundational to the success of this programme is a thorough understanding of the challenges faced by the transportation industry as they set about innovating their business models, digital technologies, and organisational change to compete through DEAS.

We would very much welcome researchers to join us at this workshop and ask the questions of these businesses that lead us to begin to define the research agenda within transportation and mobility for DEAS. This agenda will then inform the pilot projects we commission and help to grow the membership of our networkplus. We encourage ECRs to attend.