Last October the Prime Minister announced that more than £200m would be invested over the next four years in a network of Technology and Innovation Centres, to be funded through the Technology Strategy Board (see the TSB prospectus at http://www.innovateuk.org/ ).

The GB rail’s Technical Strategy Leadership Group has been coordinating the rail industry’s response, including innovation themes and the business case for a Transport Systems and Integration TIC. This has been done through workshops involving all stakeholders in the GB rail industry (including academia) and has resulted in the working report provided here. Although rail focused, thought has been given as to the areas where common innovation themes exist across two or more transport sectors since exploiting synergies is understood to be a vital component of a successful transport related proposal for a TIC.

RSSB has commissioned ARUP to develop the report, and the two documents provided here are the latest version of the full working report and a smaller executive summary which is a subset of the former. This is still work in progress but we feel it is important to share our thoughts at this point and seek any constructive contributions you may have to the overall debate and the report contents in particular.

We envisage the next stage is to develop this work to include the inputs from the automotive, marine and aviation sectors.

Please send any feedback you may wish to provide to james.hardy@rssb.co.uk. We look forward to hearing from you.