Week 2 - Defining the objectives and direction

Since many of the stakeholders of our project appeared to prefer english, we have switched the language to English. I have also translated the description and the first blog post.

WEEK 2

Since the messy background of all kind of problems related to charging the electrical vehicles on the road had become more clear, the beginning of the week was all about defining our objectives and the direction we wanted to move on. The ultimate goal of the EU-project our substance advisors are in, is to create an user-friendly and complete ecosystem that would contain all the commercial charging poles and all the big players in a single system.  However, the need for this kind of solution has been out there for quite a long time and no perfect solution have occured so far. Thus, we wanted to think a little bit differently and rely more on crowdsourcing.

The idea of an "airbnb" - liked service for electrical vehicles came to light in our meeting on Tuesday. We had investigated the current markets as group and each of us agreed there could be market potential for this kind of new service. We sent the description of our idea to the contact person Kary Främling who approved it. The first smart parking group decided to focus more on the existing situation including players like Fortum and Virta which meant both groups will have their own scope and objectives.

On Thursday we had a meeting with our contact persons Kary and Andrea, smart parking group 1 and  Natalia from Forum Virium. Natalia described the current situation thoroughly and gave many great examples of similar projects. Andrea and Kary encouraged us to take also other crowdsourcing and shared-economy opportunities (like shared EV-cars) into account which our group felt usefull. We also discussed about the final solution. Could it be for example a start-up idea? Or should we concentrate on finding an universal answer how EV charging could be done?

The last part of our efficient week was the workshop with course staff and other groups. We held a small presentation and discussed about state of the project.

Picture 2: Group members in the meeting 
 
The outcome of the week 2 was, that our objective is to find a entirely new and complete solution on EV charging, that is based on crowdsourcing and shared-economy. A preferred solution would be an app that is based on the concept we will develop. 

Now it is time to get our hands dirty and get the project going - see you next week!