INTERVIEW

Sam Sherwood-Hale spoke to Milda Manomaityte about the Unlocking Innovation Programme, change in the rail industry and how to build a culture that embraces innovation

SSH: How did you start at RIA? MM: I was a transport journalist in Lithuania covering intermodal maritime transport, then in 2007 I moved to the UK. I started out organising transport events and then about a year later I launched a newsletter for rail access to the airport market. This evolved into a membershipbased community, the Global AirRail Alliance (GARA) which I ran for eight years, essentially as a one-woman band. I was looking for a new challenge when I ran into Darren Caplan, RIA’s Chief Executive and someone I knew from my GARA days, he was looking for someone to join the team and here we are!

SSH: You started this new role as Innovation Director in April this year, how have you found it so far? MM: I have been at RIA for about four and a half years, first in the Technical and Policy teams helping RIA to deliver various events using my networking skills. A key part of this was the Unlocking Innovation Programme – which brings together innovators and ‘problem owners’, and which has grown significantly in the last few years. Given how important innovation is for the industry, and for many of our members, I was thrilled to have been asked to be RIA’s Innovation Director. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time in the role so far, and I am looking forward to continue helping our members bring their innovative ideas onto our railways.

SSH: Earlier this year, RIA released the report ‘A Railway Innovation Strategy: Getting Ready for Great British Railways’. What was your involvement in the production of that report? MM: Myself and my colleague Sam Bemment led the production of the report, with support from our Technical Director David Clarke as well as other colleagues. We also worked closely with our members and partners around the industry to reflect their priorities and concerns.

Innovation activity within the entire railway industry is tied up in many ways – and funding pots. Notably, for Control Period 6, Network Rail received a record amount of investment for research and development with a total portfolio of £245 million. This is alongside competitions from Innovate UK, the DfT and others.

So it has been recognised that innovation is important and it is acknowledged that you need to have dedicated teams, funding, and a research and development pipeline. The challenge is how rail businesses navigate this. We decided to release a report that looked at how this funding has influenced the industry, what it has done for the suppliers and what can be done better as Great British Railways is established. That’s why we called it ‘Getting ready for Great British Railways’. We spoke with Network Rail’s Research and Development Portfolio Team about what they would like to see improved and we've also talked with Innovate UK about the First of a Kind competitions as well as the innovation landscape in the UK.

One of the big messages in the report is that innovation is not always branded correctly – there is some confusion between research, development, and innovation. The Oxford English Dictionary defines innovation as ‘the introduction of new things, ideas, or ways of doing something’. The key word is ‘introduction’ – innovation is the beginning of the process to turn something novel into business as usual. At some point on this journey, the expenditure of resources will be offset by the business benefits, meaning innovation should, given time, represent a ‘net-gain’.

We talk a lot about R&D funding, but the funding often stops a bit short at the innovation rollout – and it’s the rollout stage where your investment begins to pay back, so overcoming this omission is critical. Proof of concepts are a crucial step, but in a ‘payback’ sense it is not enough, you need to have an organisational system that can actually get that product, technique that you've developed to the market, because that's when the passengers and freight customers see the benefit. We have a world class Rail R&D base, through the UK Rail Research & Innovation Network and other channels. However, all the cost savings, emission savings and operational efficiency only happen if you take what you’ve developed and actually put it on the railways. Currently, that’s where the biggest gap exists.

SSH: Why do you think that gap exists? MM: We always say at RIA is that if you want efficiency you need to have a consistent and planned level of work. You cannot do nothing for ten years and then say here’s lots of funding, because then the infrastructure, the organisation, the people are not in place and you effectively have to start from scratch. It is the same principle with all complex rail projects. It is why we wrote the Electrification Cost Challenge Report, to rebuke those saying electrification is unaffordable. In reality, the industry had seen no electrification projects for years, and then all of a sudden there was a massive spike in work, giving companies little time to train people, create systems and invest in equipment – the same rings true for innovation.

So whilst it’s great that we have this fund available for innovators, there was no consistent ecosystem created to take the ideas, develop them to a proof of concept and roll them out. All of this had to be created over the last two and a half years, so

the system is still finding its feet. One of the biggest challenges now is implementation. RIA work with academic researchers and with suppliers and over and over again we hear the same thing: once it comes to rolling out to market there are very few people who have time to do it as they all have day jobs with their own responsibilities, and very often those responsibilities are keeping the railway running!

Somebody comes along saying ‘hey, there’s this new product, go deploy it on your network’, that carries a risk, and there needs to be someone there to champion this change and work with the teams around the country so that innovation actually gets rolled out, someone who is empowered to make changes, has the budget to do so, and is allowed to fail.

One of the things we are calling for in the strategy is the creation of that kind of innovation culture – we want everyone, from the leaders to the people on the ground, to have that space to innovate.

SSH: How do we create that innovation culture? MM: Rail is a very risk-averse industry, with safety understandably a primary concern. Everyone is proud of the standards of safety we uphold. However, during the pandemic we showed that we can innovate quickly, without compromising that safety. Many innovations were enabled and indeed accelerated because the railways still had to operate and a lot of the jobs that needed to be done required a physical presence. There was this message to socially distance but work was still being done on the track, companies had to innovate quickly to meet both requirements. For example, the ability to remotely monitor the condition of an asset was suddenly essential. Elsewhere, one company which develops train-mounted cameras to measure and inspect track, now had a customer with a real desire to bring the product to market because of that burning need to keep the railways moving whilst staying compliant with the new regulations.

SSH: How do you interact with the industry? MM: RIA is well-positioned to hear many industry voices and it’s our job to listen to what’s going on in the sector. Through our events we also bring suppliers who have the space to create new ideas, in the same room with clients and buyers who need to find new ways of working and tackle new challenges. These are about matching solutions to age-old railway problems. We also work closely with universities through the UK Rail Research & Innovation Network, which bring their world-leading research capabilities to the table.

As a national trade body, it is our role to provide a simple forum for members to network and engage. If you’re a smaller company just coming into the industry, you might not know where to start. So, normally they will come to us and we can connect them to the organisation and potentially we will have the name of the right person to talk to.

SSH: How does RIA’s Unlocking Innovation programme work? MM: Unlocking Innovation came from our technical team which focused a lot on technologies and now that there is this standalone innovation team running the Unlocking Innovation programme it encompasses everything that RIA does. It is about encouraging innovation, working with our policy team and helping to export those UK businesses abroad, it’s marketing and events to help change the perception of rail as this old technology. It can be frustrating because, yes the UK is the birthplace of railways and we’ve had 200 years of it but we’re not just using the same infrastructure. Railway is adapting and modernising by using renewable materials and sustainable energy, digital signalling, and machine learning. So Unlocking Innovation does encompass everything that RIA is by tackling all these different areas. I think the biggest part of it is the culture. What I would like to do with the program is to take what we've done well, working with universities and the various places where research and

development is happening, and to bring the private sector and railway clients together to inspire everyone to work together.

The last event that we had was at University College London, at their PEARL facility in Dagenham which is a really interesting facility that can simulate an environment with lots of people, such as at a train station, as well as different air conditions like humidity or temperature or different lighting conditions. We were able to bring suppliers to that space and give them a chance to see this technology being demonstrated live in the flesh instead of just reading a press release.

SSH: Is that what excites you the most, getting people used to the idea of change and changing the industry’s approach to innovation? MM: I would say that innovation is part of my personality. I grew up in a world of quite drastic change, especially in Lithuania which became independent in 1991 opening to a world of opportunities, maybe most importantly the launch of the Internet. And so I always joke that Windows updates and changes like that don’t bother me. It is probably because of this that I embrace an ever-changing environment, which also explains why I find innovation so exciting.

At the PEARL event for example, each exhibitor had a ten-minute showcase at their stand instead of going on stage and doing a presentation. It worked really well, and we had great feedback from attendees and exhibitors. Our challenge now though is how we are going to do something different for our next event on ‘Intelligent Railways’ at UKRRIN’s facility in Birmingham – stay tuned for more!

SSH: Where are we seeing innovation in the industry? MM: We see incremental innovation every day in the railways, but it might be something that doesn’t make the headlines because it’s not as exciting. For us it’s important to build excitement for the railway industry and for that we need radical innovation as we call it. It doesn't have to be flying trains but for it to happen there needs to be space for operational testing so we're calling for a test fleet where you can implement some innovative ideas and see them in real life. Some of this could happen in a sandbox environment, the Global Centre of Rail Excellence in Wales could be a place to do that. They will have the first railway loop in a test centre where it is possible to test infrastructure and rolling stock at the same time. We need these places where you can take these innovations and that proof of concept and test it out. I recently attended the Northern and Network Rail Digital Innovation showcase, they brought together their suppliers to look at the technologies that are at the ‘what's next’ stage, we need to test it, tweak it or we need to now roll it out because we proved that it works. Northern is a good example of a TOC that has stepped up and said they want to be digital innovators, another example would be First Group who have created a community amongst their Innovation Managers to share these ideas with each other.

Looking ahead, we are asking for a portion of any innovation or R&D funding to be allocated to what you might call radical ideas or a ‘risk pot’, where it doesn’t matter if it fails because for radical innovation you don't know what's going to happen. For an industry that is not very comfortable with change, that is the real challenge.

Milda Manomaityte is Innovation Director at the Railway Industry Association she tweets at @manomilda.