We commissioned research into the challenges of enabling innovation on the railway and have received an initial report: Enabling technical innovation in the GB rail industry-barriers and solutions. This reveals that barriers exist at three levels - industry, organisation and tools/techniques. It identifies seven key success factors:

• A unified system-wide perspective: A common understanding and capability to assess the systemwide opportunities of technology decisions
• Clear and stable policies and incentives: which - Balance social, economic and sustainability demands and trade offs
  - Reflect the full life of assets
  - Provide commercially-motivated demand for innovation
• Longer term technology planning: More sophisticated technology strategies, including platform engineering (which involves engineering new products in such a way that it is possible to reuse product components and apply variability with decreased costs and time) and radical innovationconcepts, to allow faster technology lifecycles
• A capability resource base for innovation: Active and strong knowledge networks and programmes of research, leading to significant demonstrators of radical systems opportunities
• Harmonised standards: Progress in harmonising philosophies, standards and technologies across international boundaries so innovations can flow more easily between markets
• A collaborative supply chain: A community of suppliers collaborating to form responsive supply chains contributing to the GB economy and serving global markets – based on the right incentives coming through the style of contractual engagement
• Better risk management at technology introduction: Better ways of working to manageand reduce the risk of introducing innovation to the railway system (developed before implementation)

The research identified a range of enablers to facilitate innovation, regardless of the context - ie they apply at any level of the business and whatever scope or issue is involved. They do not imply any structural change or necessitate the creation of new groups. The outputs from the Enabling Innovation project form a toolkit for technologically based innovation in the rail industry.

• Establish a top-level ‘business leadership’ function - to provide the business support and to secure funding to develop/apply new technologies and integration with industry planning
• Establish a ‘technology leadership’ function
  - to identify and make the case for innovative solutions. This leadership role would be positioned appropriately for the business circumstances. In the context of the thirty year roadmap and for the most complex and challenging innovations, TSLG will provide the leadership function for the industry
• Create tiered templates for contract conditions to align industry incentives, drawing on lessons from recent cross-industry projects
• Design and develop more effective mechanisms to translate ideas into demonstrable, de-risked, system-level, radical innovation projects
• Build upon existing materials and disseminate models of good practice (drawing on experience from other industries)
• Promote Open Innovation (sharing ideas and benefits across the supply chain and beyond) for the early phases of the innovation process
• Build on and reinforce existing support and coaching resources for acceptance processes/standards
• Build on the ERA’s work on cross-acceptance of rolling stock, to extend this into other rail environments
• Take steps to ensure good access to appropriate test facilities
• Build on existing and find new mechanisms to help the industry manage the commercial risk of testing on the operating railway