A Railway Innovation Strategy April 2022
RADICAL INNOVATION Key Ask 4: Provide a pathway and funding for radical innovation. To maximise the chance of positive change and securing the greatest benefits we should be prepared to focus a portion of any innovation portfolio on radical and challenging innovations - accepting some may fail, but those which succeed will provide ample reward.
Innovation in traction: incremental, radical and whole system A good example of the difference between incremental and radical innovation, and the importance of whole-system thinking, can be seen in the evolution of traction. For many years, the railway was dependent upon steam locomotives. Incremental innovation in steam technology allowed faster and heavier trains, but the underpinning technology – burning coal and the expansion of steam in a cylinder – remained the same. Maintenance was intensive, efficiency was low, and by modern standards, it was very dirty. Electric traction can be seen as a radical innovation which completely transformed this. Electric traction was clean and allowed more intensive services. Modern electric trains are, of course very different to the first endeavours, and this is again the result of incremental innovation in electric traction technology.
Incremental innovation is important to continuous improvement, ensuring the customer offering continues to meet expectations. Radical innovation creates whole new customer offerings - growing industries and bringing about step-change reductions in costs. Radical innovation is key to upskilling, levelling-up and economic growth. The more radical an innovation, the greater the potential risk of failure, but the greater the potential reward. And as an industry we must be more accepting of failure as a step in the process of change. Approaches to enable cross-disciplinary radical innovation are discussed in the section on creating an innovation friendly environment. Radical innovation, sometimes referred to as disruptive innovation, is a technology, technique or business model which has the capability to completely transform or replace the existing ways of doing things. It takes an existing system, design or invention and adapts it into something new. It may change the parts of the system, processes, or both. Radical innovation can be a well-developed technology from another industry applied to the railway for the first time. It brings about a step-change reduction in cost or improvement in customer offering, compared to the current best way of solving the challenge. The boundary between radical and incremental innovation is difficult to define, and often a matter of opinion. The reality is, of course, that it is a scale, and the definitions overlap, therefore we have provided some illustrative examples.
Though the benefits were clear, the radical shift to electric traction would not have been possible without a whole-system view. The most obvious physical change was the requirement for a power supply to be placed alongside the track. However, less obvious was the creation of whole new engineering disciplines to install and maintain this. New infrastructure technology, depots, maintenance and overhaul procedures, operational and safety practices were required, along with staff training.
British railway expertise and technology is still held in high regard overseas and it is a strong export sector as demonstrated by its prominence in recent free trade agreements. Technology developed, demonstrated, and adopted here has a high chance of becoming exportable. Historically, our rolling stock and signalling technologies have found significant markets overseas.
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