Charlie Wilson gave a public lecture exploring the links between digitalisation and climate change. Focusing on the ways in which digital goods and services are used in daily life – accelerated by lockdowns over the past year – Charlie showed how the impacts of digitalisation on carbon emissions can lead us to both climate utopia and climate […]
Post written by Emilie Vrain A strong focus of SILCI research has been to investigate the importance of different types of social influence in diffusing information about low carbon digital innovations. One key finding has been the importance of electronic word-of mouth (eWOM) between consumers. eWOM usually refers to content on social media and online forums, however, over the past year, another […]
Post written by Emilie Vrain Research conducted by the SILCI team provides new insights on the importance of social influence in the uptake of digital consumer innovations for climate change across mobility, food, homes and energy domains. Using nationally representative UK survey data (n=3000), we show that electronic word-of-mouth is the dominant mechanism of information exchange […]
Post written by Emilie Vrain As part of the SILCI project, a large online survey was conducted in both the UK and Canada. The survey’s aim was to understand consumers’ perceptions, communication behaviour, and adoption propensity towards a wide range of low-carbon innovations in four different consumer domains: transport, food, homes and energy. The survey instrument, datasets collected, and further information are now available […]
Post written by Emilie Vrain SILCI team member Emilie Vrain has created a couple of short ‘postcard’ videos to provide insights on the benefits and barriers to some of the digital innovations being researched by the project. These videos (available here) are being used as teaching material by Dr Tom Hargreaves at the University of East Anglia as part of the module – Energy […]
Post written by Barnaby Andrews The SILCI team has been analysing survey data from over 3000 UK adults who answered a series of questions about 16 different low carbon innovations related to transport, food, homes and energy. We were interested to see if innovation adopters could be identified from their values and lifestyles. We used a statistical technique called hierarchical clustering to identify three distinct […]
Post written by Barnaby Andrews The SILCI team has been hard at work analysing data from a survey of over 3000 people in the UK. We asked respondents a range of questions including whether they used or had ‘adopted’ a range of different low carbon innovations. We then compared responses between adopters and non-adopters to understand what […]
The EU’s Green Deal is a comprehensive plan for policy, research, innovation and investment to make Europe climate neutral by 2050. Reaching net zero emissions is also a key criterion for the EU’s €750 billion recovery package from Covid-19 recessions. To support progress of the Green Deal, the EU’s information services organisation ‘CORDIS’ produced a results pack from frontier research … including […]
Charlie Wilson gave a talk to the Oxford Energy Network on “How do new things spread? The diffusion of digital low-carbon innovations”. Charlie explored the many analogies between the underlying mechanisms of virus transmission – about which we’ve all sadly become armchair experts – and the underlying mechanisms of innovation diffusion. He then showed a range of new evidence from the SILCI project demonstrating the […]
Post written by Emilie Vrain A new article from the SILCI team published in ‘Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions’ demonstrates the importance of studying social networks and communication behaviour to provide insights into potential obstacles for rapid diffusion of low carbon innovations. Using smart home technology as a case study, this paper identifies marketing strategies and policy actions using social […]