Current projects
sustainability of mobility
As part of the Smart Rail Connectivity Campus (SRCC) in the Erzgebirge district, the joint project "Sustainable Mobility (NaMo)" examines the users who are at the center of mobility and their needs and attitudes in order to support the successful design of mobility innovations and their integration into existing social structures.
To this end, the focus of the investigation is placed on users and other demand-inducing stakeholders in order to ascertain the underlying causes of mobility, i.e. needs, and thus to answer the question of why people want or need to be mobile in a specific case. The mobility needs and the mutually related attitudes towards mobility ultimately justify the mobility behavior. The latter decides on the use of mobility offers and thus also on the success or failure of new mobility concepts on the market.
From February 2022 to January 2025, the mobility-related needs and attitudes of users in the Erzgebirge district, as well as their behavior, will be analyzed on the basis of comprehensive empirical analyzes and practical deductions will be made from these findings. This increases the sustainability of current and future mobility projects and closes a significant research gap in the field of mobility innovation.
Embedding and goal of the project
"NaMo" is embedded in the SRCC as a joint project of Chemnitz University of Technology , which is part of the "WIR! – Change through innovation in the region” is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
WIR! supports projects that are intended to initiate sustainable structural change through the formation of regional innovation alliances made up of research institutions, companies and civil society actors in structurally weak regions.
In this context, the aim of the SRCC as a neutral institutional and infrastructural platform in the Erzgebirge district is to initiate and promote innovations in the field of digital networking and communication in rail transport, which above all gradually network automated driving on the rails and the integration of rail transport in multimodal Enable mobility offers. This is intended to promote and enable sustainable mobility in the region and to make a contribution to the economic success of the companies involved.
The goals of "NaMo" are therefore the development of a methodology for the design of needs-based and sustainable mobility approaches and the derivation of concrete design recommendations for sustainable mobility in the economic and tourist region of the Ore Mountains.
Contact Person
JenErgieReal
"Real laboratories of the energy transition" - energy-optimized quarters
Project duration: 01/01/2022 – 12/31/2026
short description
The research and transfer project JenErgieReal sees itself as a blueprint for the future holistic supply of electrical and thermal energy and the integration of mobility as a link.
The main drivers of energy consumption in transport, industry, commerce and housing are considered across sectors and the implementation is scientifically accompanied in an exemplary large-scale project.
The overall goal of JenErgieReal is the demonstration of sector coupling through innovative power plant structures for the realization of an affordable energy transition. The central topics of the JenErgieReal project focus on grid utility and aim at grid stabilization without grid expansion. Measures that make this possible include load peak smoothing, load control, also from the upstream network, and reduced feed-in.
In the various work topics, solutions for future quarters from the end consumer to the producer are developed and implemented. Regulatory learning plays an important role in this.
The results will be demonstrated as a real laboratory in the city of Jena.
subproject at the chair
Duration: 07/2023-04/2024
Support for the project partners at the Zwickau University of Applied Sciences and the Ernst Abbe University Jena in the planning, conception and organization of the empirical surveys, the theory-based evaluation and the preparation of the results for publication in scientific specialist literature.
contact person
project partner
- City administration of Jena
- Stadtwerke Jena Netze GmbH
- Stadtwerke Energie Jena Pößneck GmbH
- jenawohnen GmbH
- AWO Regionalverband Mitte-West-Thüringen e.V.
- Metrona Union GmbH
- Westsächsische Hochschule Zwickau
- Ernst-Abbe-Hochschule Jena
- TU Chemnitz
QuaSiSocI – Quality assurance in social innovations
Our basic understanding of social innovations
Social innovations are innovations that address social challenges and in a process devise, test, evaluate and finally embed new social practices for a specific social group. Social innovations often have a regional reference and are embedded in the existing political, cultural and economic system, which can influence the development of social innovations and thus promote, slow down or prevent it. Social innovations go through a multi-stage process until they are finally applied to the target group. Whether and how new new social practices are can be viewed from different perspectives. Here, for example, the target group, the organization offering them or the region can be used to decide whether they are new in this context and what is new about them.
Relevant scientific perspectives on the topic of quality assurance of social innovations
Quality assurance and impact measurement of social innovations and their concrete implementation are current scientific questions that also have high practical relevance. Various theoretical concepts can be used to assess the quality of social innovations. We understand quality assurance of social innovations as an overarching perspective that consists of the delimitation of social innovation, its development in individual phases, the assessment of novelty and the evaluation of input, output, outcome and impact. A first step is to record what defines social innovations, characterizes them and distinguishes them from other types of innovation. This allows practical projects to be assigned, for example, based on their connection to a specific social problem. With the help of a phase model for the process of social innovations, practical projects can be classified with regard to their development, whether they are in the idea, conception, testing or scaling phase or are already being used. The phase perspective can be used to assess whether the practical projects are progressing in their development and what support needs they communicate, receive and accept in the phases. The maturity levels of social innovations make it possible to determine for whom practical projects are new and how new they are. This also allows practical projects to be compared with one another or assessed in terms of their context specifics. In addition, impact measurement aspects can be focused on, for example, those that deal with the impact on society. This also includes identifying input factors that have already been identified, for example, when assessing the phases of social innovation. With regard to output, outcome and impact, connections can be drawn to the social problem, the starting point of social innovations, or to the maturity level and the novelty of a practical project.
Projektpartner
Projektlaufzeit
01.06.2024 - 31.12.2025
Ansprechpartner
