Resumen
There is an increasing awareness that urban freight transport contributes to urban problems like air pollution, noise pollution and congestion which gives rise to much call for innovative urban freight measures and solutions. Throughout the past few decades, a range of solutions to reduce the negative impact of urban freight transport have been researched, tested and implemented. Since the start of this millennium, authors have been stating that successful measures and solutions require co-operation between the different (commercial and public) stakeholders. In the 1990's, Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff proposed the model of a Triple Helix of university-industry-government relations for explaining innovation in knowledge-based economies. The Triple Helix states that innovation happens at the intersection of three institutional spaces and that there is an important role to be played by universities and knowledge institutions. In urban freight transport, the idea that innovation is driven by commercial and public actors as well as researchers is not very common. In this paper, we use the demonstrations of the European FP7 project Straightsol to confront the Triple Helix model with innovation in urban freight transport. For each case, we explore the role of industry, government and knowledge institution and the mutual dynamics and interactions and analyse how this contributed to innovation.