RSSB
David Clarke explains how industry is finally walking the talk on innovation I
nnovation sustains and renews successful businesses. At its most radical, innovation can create complete new products or processes and unseat existing market leaders, ask Kodak or Nokia. At the more modest end of the spectrum, introducing a new approach or technology into your business, perhaps from another sector, is also innovation. Innovation is not invention, it is about what ideas can do for your business, a simple definition of innovation that I like is the ‘profitable exploitation of new ideas’.
The UK rail industry has a fantastic history of innovation but, in recent years has often found it difficult to move from concept to ‘profitable exploitation’. The good news is that there is now a strong consensus among rail industry leaders that the vision for the future railway cannot be realised without encouraging more innovation.
The problem has been that innovation is so often held back by a circular argument that investment is needed to prove something works, but at the same time there is risk aversion to investing until that something can be shown to work. Traditionally, there has been no dedicated cross-industry team designed to match the longer-term business challenges to innovative solutions and, where necessary, to provide funding to help unlock the potential in those untested new ideas by supporting demonstration projects. That is, until now.
Enabling Innovation Team The Enabling Innovation team has been set up by the Technical Strategy Leadership Group (TSLG) as part of the FutureRailway programme, specifically to accelerate the uptake of innovation by offering support to practical cross- industry demonstrator projects. Our approach is to understand the challenges that industry faces; connect potential innovators with these challenges; and, where necessary with potential funding. The team is hosted by RSSB, and reports into TSLG, and is supported by the Rail Delivery Group as well as the
Department for Transport. We believe that if you can take a concept out on to the railway and prove it works, you can make the case for further business-led investment, meaning you can change things and you can apply thinking from elsewhere.
There are three major areas of work we’re looking at. The first is to identify from the Rail Technical Strategy and industry leaders the big challenges the industry faces which might be addressed by innovation. We will then typically run dedicated ‘challenge competitions’ for the marketplace to apply their innovative ideas to the particular areas or questions rail needs to grasp, to deliver the railway of the future capable of doing more and improving customer satisfaction while costing less in both money and carbon.
Step change in train performance What are the opportunities to improve the customer experience in areas of service culture, business process, journey planning, seamless journey experience and design of facilities? How could we achieve a step change in the performance of trains? How do we approach the future of rail traffic regulation? What is the best way of exploiting remote condition monitoring to its full potential? These are all areas where we have identified challenges and have or expect to run competitions to identify suitable candidates to support demonstrator- projects. In the case of ‘customer experience’, our £1million prize fund competition yielded 111 entries, which were shortlisted to 16. These were taken forward to the final live event in London in September where they bid live before judges for funding.
Lessons from auto sector
Also what can we learn from others? For example, can the automotive sector bring something to rail in the shape of low carbon vehicle technology? We sponsored a dedicated rail industry seminar at LCV2013, the UK’s largest low carbon vehicle event, earlier in September. This was used to learn from the experience of the low carbon vehicle
community and inform them about the technology roadmap, innovation needs and innovation processes associated with the UK rail industry.
The second area is to spread the word and make sure innovators everywhere know we are always open to receive ideas and applications for funding. If people have an innovative operational/business solution or technology which they believe could address the challenges faced by the rail industry and deliver benefits to the railway, then we want to hear from them. Likewise we would love to hear from rail colleagues who have challenges which are crying out for an innovative solution to help them deliver the railway that this country deserves. This will help us to bring together innovators and potential industry customers to their mutual benefit. We want to protect the intellectual property in ideas and so we treat all communication in strictest confidence, entering into confidentiality agreements if required. We will usually take an investor-like approach in considering whether to support an idea - we will want to see a market demand and a clear route to implementing the proposal and we will want a return for the industry on our investment. We have been told that one of the
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