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NSAR’s Neil Robertson on the strategic approach needed to maintain rail’s momentum
The solutions to the railway’s problems
Liam Henderson, the founder of the Rail Innovation Group, on the major role for smaller companies in bringing about innovation
Liam Henderson is helping to inspire the rail sector to embrace new cultures to bring diversity to its supply chains.
It was in 2016 that he founded the Rail Innovation Group, formed to develop an ecosystem of start-up tech companies in rail. In the last four years he has built relationships across the industry to promote the need to engage smaller suppliers in project development.
“There’s always a risk that people within established industries start to think that innovation is being done to them, not for them,” he said. “But the last few months during the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the important role these start-ups have to play for them. “I have been very impressed with how quick they have been to pivot to respond to the COVID challenge, which proves that smaller agile companies are the future for the rail supply chain.”
Metaphorical door The Rail Innovation Group has built partnerships and helped traditional organisations understand and attract digital talent to support their service development. It has proved to be the ideal metaphorical door for several companies, particularly during the pandemic.
He said: “Innovation is essential, particularly at the moment as we’ve got to change our working practices. Although I don’t think you should label all technological change as innovation, the term should be expanded to apply to developing different partnerships for delivering workstreams or bringing in new stakeholders to solve a challenge. Often it creates a more efficient way of doing business as usual. A lot of the smaller companies we engage with have solutions that can overcome immediate problems. We have one
member who happened to be in the right place in the right time offering track monitoring without a member of staff needing to be out there doing the monitoring.”
It is these sorts of doors that the group has opened for several groups, and although they can answer the calls for immediate problems, there is also a longer lasting benefit.
“There’s no reason why these technologies, products and innovations won’t be relevant in the longer term,” said Liam.
“A couple of members have got together to build a product that maps and predicts national rail demand so you can tell who is on the network at any one moment.
“Because COVID came along there was an urgent need to know who was on which train and whether this was going to exceed crowding.
“COVID has meant that change has had to be accelerated in some areas. I don’t think that anything developed in response to the COVID challenge will be wasted as this great work will have a legacy.” Liam also believes that during the pandemic it has been easier to engage with people across the industry.
“It is one of the more positive aspects about the way we are doing things at the moment,” he said. “With most people working at home I’ve found their barriers are a little bit softer.
“I think a lot of the frustration with innovative practices not moving forward at the pace that the industry would like is that you’d get an innovation project, it would be proven to
work, and it wouldn’t end up going into the main business because it was seen as done because the innovation box had been ticked. But now because the challenges are coming from the day-to-day business, who are crying out for solutions, they have a channel of start-ups or innovation products that are just going straight into the business. “They are bypassing the proof of concept bit in the innovation-specific team and they are just going straight in. In the long term it probably has a benefit because people in the engineering department can see ‘Oh look, we’ve got this supply chain we can just go straight to.’”
Start Up Rail Emerging from the Rail Innovation Group, Liam is the founder and CEO of Start Up Rail, a nonprofit organisation created to find and promote new types of digital suppliers for the rail industry.
Also, through his organisation, Transporting Cities, he uses professional experience from his transport planning background at Transport for London to advocate for, and undertake, planning and policy development projects for public bodies both in the UK and internationally.
“More than four years ago I was working as a consultant in rail and saw that there were a lot of people excited about the idea of innovation but weren’t really in a position to do anything about it,” he said.
“So, what I wanted to do was to bring a community of people together who as a stronger, louder voice could have more of an impact on steering what we are innovating in. At the time the government was putting all these innovation commitments into rail franchises, but then you couldn’t really score how effective it was and if the innovation was actually going into the main business.
“Equally the barrier to entry for small companies was so high that I wanted to help get more diversity of companies into the sector, rather than just asking for existing rail suppliers to be more innovative.”
What initially started as a few ad hoc conversations and several workshops, soon led to monthly meet ups and the creation of a new community.
Big vision In 2018 they were ready to go big with their vision, so they arranged the Rail Innovation Forum, where they brought 20 start-up companies and invited people from across the rail industry to come and see what their tech had to offer.
Last year, the group built their presence within the sector to formally endorse people and products through their Recognised Innovation Scheme. The Rail Innovation Group also RIG Member Focus: 3Squared 3Squared is one of the founding members of the Rail Innovation Group and has been recognised in the RIG Innovation Scheme for its RailSmart products for contributing to improving efficiencies in the rail industry.
The Rail Innovation Group is a great way of sharing ideas and best practices for others to learn, it’s particularly important for helping startups understand routes into the rail’s supply chain. For 3Squared, being part of the Rail Innovation Group has been a great way to meet like-minded companies who want to make a difference in rail, along with being able to join the inspirational ‘Munch & Learn’ events. We’d recommend other companies get involved, small or big to help shape innovation in the industry.
partnered with Hitachi to create the first Start Up Rail event, where they visited a tech community to provide insight on the opportunities available in the rail sector.
“I think rail still has a bit of a branding issue because if you are becoming a developer, or doing some coding, you don’t really think about
developing a product for the rail sector because the image is not particularly dynamic and exciting,” he said. “I think the branding has got a lot better over the years, but it still talks a lot about trains rather than technology.
“We need to be comfortable with bringing people from other sectors to help bring new awareness and ideas and also be more comfortable with different types of people working in the sector. Technology just needs to be as respected a part of the rail sector as the engineers. They all have a role to play, but we seem to see the engineers as the ‘rail people’ and the tech people as those on the periphery. Whereas in reality, a scheme like HS2 I’m sure 40 per cent of the project is technology.”
Looking to the future, Liam says the priorities moving forward will very much follow how rail is changing.
“We spent the last four years telling small companies that in order to succeed in rail you need to understand how the investment and incentives for innovation go, which is generally wrapped up in franchising,” he said.
“Since the franchising system seems to be stopping, we’ve got to re-learn what the incentives are. So our job next year will be to work out what on earth rail is going to look like and how the small companies can support that journey going forward.
“But what has been proven, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, is that there is a major role for the smaller companies to play and we’ve got to make sure they can get their ideas out there.”
