What is in place now

• A focused and compelling Rail Technical Strategy that enables prioritisation of efforts in the shorter term with a clear longer-term direction of travel.
• Pockets of business driven innovation where targeted initiatives have been established to solve specific business problems.
• Coordinated and aligned publicly funded research, development and innovation pipelines.
• Pipelines of R&D balanced across incremental and step-change solutions, covering a wide range of Rail Industry Readiness Level (RIRLs), with industry driving the incremental and higher RIRL initiatives.
• An increasingly devolved industry where train operators and infrastructure managers can identify, lead and deploy solutions to benefit regional and local customers and other beneficiaries.

What we are working on

• Scaling up the level of engagement of business leaders and front-line teams with innovation.
• Increasing the visibility of work and initiatives, led by different organisations across the sector, that are relevant to the five RTS functional priorities.
• Improving the level of awareness of important new findings and solutions emerging from R&D.
• Planning and scheduling of testing and in-service piloting while R&D is underway.
• Exploiting further newly created opportunities and mechanisms to collaborate across the value chain and bring together different expertise, as successfully demonstrated by UKRRIN.

Where we need to get to

• All businesses, and the individuals, which work in rail recognise the imperative of driving innovation, and investing in solutions beyond the needs of today’s railway.
• Industry leaders commit to sponsoring solutions to long-term challenges.
• Research delivery is prioritised and timed to maximise deployment and implementation opportunities, and is overseen and steered by empowered cross-industry entities.
• New solutions are developed in ways which de-risk their introduction with better use of system integration, simulations and modelling tools.