The SHOW project (SHared automation Operating models for Worldwide adoption), funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program, has successfully concluded after over four years of pioneering work. From January 2020 to September 2024, SHOW has brought together 66 partners across Europe to advance CCAM –  Cooperative Connected and Automated Mobility – solutions that meet the evolving needs of cities, communities, and stakeholders. With a mission to create efficient, sustainable, safe, and inclusive automated transportation systems, the SHOW project has left a lasting mark on the future of urban mobility.

Concluding the project, the open access book ‘Shared Mobility Revolution’ (available here) reports on the project’s main outcomes and findings. EPF is proud to have contributed through the chapter Stakeholders’ Engagement in Shared Automated Mobility: A Comparative Review of Three SHOW Approaches. In this paper, we zoom in on three engagement mechanisms—the Ideathon in Carinthia (Austria), the Hackathon in Thessaloniki (Greece) and the MAMCA (Multi-Actor Multi-Criteria Analysis) workshop in Tampere (Finland)—, presenting a variety of participative approaches for designing and evaluating new automated mobility services. The chapter offers a comparative analysis of these three approaches, highlighting for each case the opportunities and challenges. We show that stakeholder engagement activities efficiently generate ideas and validate solutions at a local level enriching the innovation process with novel perspectives, yet resource allocation and participant diversity pose challenges.

Within SHOW, EPF has been leading the task ‘Users’ engagement and co-creation activities’. The overall objective, as a horizontal task within SHOW, was to support the SHOW Demonstration sites in reaching out to end-users and other stakeholders and to steer and monitor their engagement plans and efforts. In addition, dedicated events – Ideathons and Hackathons – were organised, conceived as co-creation activities, aiming to recognize gaps and collect solution-oriented ideas to improve the services proposed by SHOW. Our final report, summarising what’s been done in SHOW in terms of users’ and stakeholder engagement, is available here on the SHOW project website.