The Railway Industry Association (RIA), which represents over 300 UK businesses, has today published a new Rail Innovation Strategy calling for the sector to be more radical and overcome barriers to innovation, including supporting the vital rollout phase ahead of the transition to Great British Railways (GBR).
RIA’s paper, A Railway Innovation Strategy, looks at the state of innovation and R&D in the sector and the barriers to getting new products and services into the railways. It stresses that further collaboration to help businesses get new ideas to market more rapidly and a culture of innovation will be key under GBR, in order to make the industry more cost-efficient, sustainable and accessible to passengers.
This comes after RIA published a survey of industry professionals in December last year, which found that whilst there is support for R&D, procurement processes remain the biggest barrier to innovation.
