Improved implementation pathways
Collaborative research and innovation with a strong industry pull, drives and de-risks take-up, leading to reliable and timely deployment of novel solutions. Effective alignment with insertion points have a key role to play in ensuring the benefits are maximised. The critical roles that people and culture play are recognised.

What is in place now
- A focussed 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.
- 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.
- Key Train Requirements encouraging and supporting the adoption of best practice and recently acquired knowledge on rolling stock.
- Research planning incorporates the development of possible options and routes to deployment, recognising the potential owners and the necessary actions.
- Closer relationships between supply chain, academia and industry established, overcoming barriers to progression of research into development and innovation.
- A framework for establishing product, system or service readiness - Rail Industry Readiness Levels (RIRLs).
- Process and commitment to challenge standards.

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.
- Ensuring that sound safety-thinking and effective standards enable innovative solutions and their deployment.
- Identifying insertion points for the introduction of new technology at an early stage in its development and taking proactive action to deliver in time to meet them.
- Connecting the RTS with wider transport and government initiatives to draw support from, and share success with other sectors.
- Scanning across sectors for fast moving and high-potential technologies and disruptors that could significantly impact railway operation and user experience.

Where we need to get to
- All businesses, and the individuals, which work in rail recognise that driving innovation and investing in solutions beyond the needs of today’s railway is imperative.
- 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.
- Key requirements (similar to the Key Train Requirements) developed for other railway systems, underpinned by dynamic, technology agnostic standards, to inform compatibility and facilitate innovation.
- Industry investment plans routinely draw on R&D outputs and the risks associated with their initial deployment are recognised, accepted and appropriately managed.
- Clear routes to develop solutions, and the associated business cases, through the RIRLs toward full market readiness are well understood and used.
- New commercial models to support deployment of new technologies and wider innovation makes innovation in rail more attractive for both public and private funders.
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Critical ENABLERS

Data driven
