COMMENT
Funding
The Radical Train innovation competition has just reached its next stage, with the 57 shortlisted entrants whittled down to eight. RTM talked to Enabling Innovation Team director David Clarke.
T
he Enabling Innovation Team, hosted by the RSSB but under the direction of the Technical Strategy Leadership Group (TSLG), is running a number of competitions and projects to try to tackle the ‘innovation gap’ in the UK rail industry.
The Radical Train competition is one such measure, and 57 initial bids for funding have since been whittled down to 11 and subsequently eight to be taken forward (see panel).
Asked about the huge response the competition received, David Clarke, director of the EIT, told RTM: “As a new organisation, this hasn’t been done in the industry before, so we were in unknown territory. We felt we were going to get a fairly good response because of the way we’d engaged with industry, we’d held a number of briefi ng events and a consortium building event. We tried to reach out and make people aware of what we were doing, and we’d gone through a process where if bidders wished to do so, they could share their initial thoughts with us before they fi nalised their proposal.
“So we knew we were going to get maybe 30- ish entries, but to get 57 was very encouraging. It does show what we believed, which is that there’s a gap in the market. There’s pent-up innovation in the industry which, hopefully, we can help release.”
He said there’d been an “interesting mixture” of bidders, both large and small companies, universities in partnership with private businesses, well-known names and smaller concerns.
The primary aim of the competition is to help those who have a good idea that solves a need in the industry, but who fi nd it to challenging to progress beyond the idea stage to proof-of- concept via a prototype or other demonstrator.
“That’s the gap into which we fi t,” Clarke said. 16 | rail technology magazine Jun/Jul 13
EIT’s mission generally, of which Radical Train is just one part, is to “deal with that gap where research comes up against a block and you need to have some facility to demonstrate a prototype”.
Risk management
The eight successful applicants are not getting a blank cheque or anything of the sort.
They will be expected to take on some of the risk, and to part-fund the work of developing their ideas.
Clarke said: “In moving towards a complete rolling demonstrator, clearly that’s a major programme in terms of cost and time.
“Some of the innovators we’d be hoping to work with would fi nd it very diffi cult to commit to that at the outset. Both for them and us, we’d want to take it in bite-sized chunks.”
For those entrants who haven’t made it through to the fi nal stage, he said, it was not necessarily the end of the process.
“We envisage that this particular round of The eight proposals being taken forward
• A kinetic energy recovery and storage system
• A better diesel engine burn system to reduce emissions
• A low carbon regional railcar featuring energy storage
• Lightweight composite structures offering reduced production costs
• Integral wheel-motor technology • Modelling of novel train operations to enhance railway capacity
• A novel radial freight bogie • Active adhesion monitoring and management
Once a binding contractual offer is in place, he said, is when “we’ll be thinking about writing cheques”.
The total funding pot for Radical Train is £4m, Clarke said, but it is expected that will be matched.
He explained: “We would not fund anything 100%. One reason for that is we want the innovator to be taking some of the risk in taking the thing forward. If we have £4m, we would expect, depending on the competition, to fund 50%, so we’d expect to see around £8m worth of activity. That suddenly starts to become quite signifi cant. The innovator’s contribution could be in cash or kind.”
competition would be just the fi rst. We would also probably run in parallel some other competitions to bring in other new ideas along the way. In actual fact, that might be a second bite of the cherry for anybody pipped at the post this time. We might go back to those people and say ‘your idea has merit, but needs strengthening in these areas’, and tell them which future competitions to look out for.
“In that way, hopefully the more promising out of the 57, even if they don’t go through immediately, there’ll be ways in which we can encourage them.”
Contractible propositions
The EIT and engineering consultancy Frazer Nash are now entering a ‘development phase’ with the 11 top bidders, of up to 10 weeks, where the consultancy will work with them to bring the offers up to the necessary standard to be contractible propositions.
Clarke said that asking for that level of detail earlier on was “too much of an overhead… it requires a lot of work, we didn’t want to discourage people from entering”.
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