Designing radical innovations of meanings for society: Envisioning new scenarios for smart mobility

The design-driven innovation literature focuses on meanings that people give to products and services. This paper investigates how new meanings can be designed and proposed to society rather than to individuals in the particular context of smart mobility. Smart mobility is characterized by a wide range of digital technologies that aim to make all mobility services within a city or territory more accessible and easy to use for citizens. At the same time, to effectively create value, the opportunities digital technologies offer must meet the needs of emerging lifestyles. In modern life, people manifest their interest in the semantic dimension by embracing solutions that are personally constructive and aligned with their cultural values. From an empirical point of view, this paper relies on two case studies that illustrate radical innovation of meanings in the smart mobility domain. Both case studies suggest a multi-level perspective: on the one hand, they address landscape pressure and the need for more sustainable solutions for future mobility; on the other hand, they propose a new understanding of transport and travel.