Abstract

International audience; In a smart city, urban and transport planning should be co-conducted harmoniously in order to create a new transit-supportive city. After defining our vision of smart mobility, we will present and analyse the links between the transport system, disruptive innovation, and the role of public policies in change management. We focus on the way to organise the co-conception of smart mobility, defined as a disruptive eco-innovation, in a local territory. The development and diffusion of innovations within the mobility ecosystem significantly disrupt usages and modify market boundaries. Implementation conditions to achieve a widespread adoption of smart mobility are discussed and the role and decision-making methods of territorial actors are considered.

Abstract

Today there is a broad consensus that mitigating the effects of the energy and climate crisis requires the substitution of fossil resources for renewable energies in the coming decades. The Paris Agreements of 2015 (COP 21) set a limit on the increase in the average temperature of the surface of the planet Earth of 1.5 ºC, which means leaving unburned about half of the reserves of fossil fuels.

Since the nature of renewable energy sources is very different from that of fossil fuels, this transition will lead to changes in the way energy is used in the transition towards sustainable social development: we are facing a real change of civilization. One of the most significant effects is the need to recapture energy from solar radiation (photovoltaic and termosolar) and its derivatives (water flows, winds, biomass). Fossil fuels are the result of capture by photosynthesis and other chemical reactions that took place hundreds of millions of years ago for hundreds of millions of years. It is a finite resource that we are now burning at a rate of 1 million times faster than when they were formed.

Estimates made by some authors allow us to affirm that the surface (and territory) requirements necessary to capture and manage renewable energies will be about 80 times those of the fossil and nuclear energy system. This aspect has not yet been internalized neither by the political representatives, nor by the economic managers, nor by the general population. This communication analyses the projection of these territorial requirements on a Catalan scale when, after reducing current energy expenditure by 21% with savings programs and good practices, it will be necessary to occupy an extension of around 124,000 hectares for photovoltaic and wind catchments of which 60,000 may be on anthropized soils and the remaining 64,000 on sensitive soils (agricultural, forests and woodlands). The lack of information and an executive plan together with the high dense and unbalanced population pose additional difficulties to Catalonia's energy transition.

In order to provide criteria for catchment implementations and to establish bridges of dialogue, since 2021 the CMES association has promoted the Energy Transition and Territory project (Transició Energètica I Territori, TEiT project) in collaboration with entities and people from different counties of Catalonia. This communication shall put numbers to these realities and ends with the exposition of the most relevant aspects that have emerged from these meetings.

Abstract

EIX 6.  SISTEMA DE CIÈNCIA I INNOVACIÓ I EL REPTE DE LA TRANSFORMACIÓ DIGITAL

Do start-ups respond to social challenges?

An empirical analysis of Catalan start-ups

            Mercedes Teruel, Agustí Segarra-Blasco and Josep Tomàs-Porres

Universitat Rovira i Virgili

On December 2021, the European Commission presented the 2021 Social Economy Action Plan. The plan aims to promote the social economy by generating the regulatory framework, visualising the potential, and opening new opportunities in order that social economy organisation start up and scale up.[1] The emergence and evolution of start-ups is related to their locational context through different linkages such as the labour market, capital market and knowledge market. From an evolutionary approach, this ecosystem evolves thanks to individual and collective learning resulting in innovation (Acs et al., 2017).

 

Despite a wide number of theoretical and empirical works about the entrepreneurial ecosystems and the emergence of start-ups (for instance, Acs et al., 2017; Stam and Van de Ven, 2021; Audretsch et al., 2023), there is a lack of empirical evidence on the relationship between the existing social challenges in a location such as climate change or ageing and the emergence of start-ups providing innovations to this social need. The evidence already points out the interconnection between local actors and the development of start-ups. For the case of sustainable start-ups, Chaudhary et al. (2024) present a systematic literature. However, there are questions that remain unknown. What role the social needs from a location play in facilitating the emergence of start-ups? Do locations with different social challenges generate start-ups with different entrepreneurial purposes?

Our main database belongs to the public directory Barcelona & Catalonia Startups Hub created at the end of 2016 by the Catalan agency for business competitiveness ACCIÓ (L'Agència per la Competitivitat de l'Empresa). This database is composed of more than 2,000 start-ups from all of Catalonia and provides firm-level information including address, year of creation, industry, technology, business model, and target. Our database was obtained in March 2023 and was composed of 2,036 start-ups.

Sustainability startups comprise 24% of the enterprises in our sample, the majority of these startups are located in the province of Barcelona. The share of start-ups that are devoting effort to CE differs between provinces.

 

References

Acs, Z. J., Stam, E., Audretsch, D. B., & O’Connor, A. (2017). The lineages of the entrepreneurial ecosystem approach. Small Business Economics, 49, 1-10.

Audretsch, D. B., Belitski, M., Caiazza, R., & Siegel, D. (2023). Effects of open innovation in startups: Theory and evidence. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 194, 122694.

Chaudhary, S., Kaur, P., Ferraris, A., Bresciani, S., & Dhir, A. (2024). Connecting entrepreneurial ecosystem and innovation. Grasping at straws or hitting a home run?. Technovation, 130, 102942.

Stam, E., & Van de Ven, A. (2021). Entrepreneurial ecosystem elements. Small Business Economics, 56(2), 809-832.