What Moves Us

In this special episode of What Moves Us, Liam Henderson, Chair of the Rail Innovation Group, is joined by Head of Initiatives Deb Carson to mark the group's tenth anniversary and the launch of its report, Small Voices Big Impact: 10 Years of Innovation. The report gathers a decade of insight from the group's community, tracing the road small companies have travelled since the first events back in 2016. Liam and Deb reflect on how much has quietly changed. The biggest shift is that rail no longer argues about whether it needs innovation. That case is won. The harder question now is deployment, getting proven ideas through the system and into everyday operation. They work through the four barriers that still hold innovators back: industry structures that are hard to navigate, limited access to the decision makers who can sponsor a project, procurement that was never built for new solutions, and sales cycles so long that a product can date before anyone adopts it. They sit with the "valley of death" between a promising trial and mainline use, and argue that small suppliers deserve to be treated as partners in solving rail's challenges. That sets up the mission for the next ten years. Innovation is now taken seriously in rail. The harder job is getting it adopted, and routes to adoption are where the Rail Innovation Group is doubling down for the decade ahead: clearer, faster, more consistent ways to carry a proven idea through the system and into everyday use. As Liam puts it, we are halfway on the journey.   Report link: https://www.railinnovationgroup.com/research  

In this episode Johannah and Liam are joined by Karen Camilleri, Founder and Managing Director of Camilleri Appointments. The Rail Innovation Group spends most of its time on how new ideas and technology reach rail. Karen works on the other half of that question, the people. She has recruited senior leaders across transport since 2008 and set up her own firm in 2019, placing directors and heads of function into rail, bus, aviation, ports and ferries. Her argument sits close to home for us: the richest source of innovation in an organisation, technology aside, is its people and the range of thinking they bring. The conversation gets into why so many strong candidates are staying put while Great British Railways and bus franchising take shape, and what that reluctance to move does to culture and fresh thinking. Karen makes the case for hiring on skills over sector, for bringing people in from outside rail, and for challenging a brief rather than filling it. She also talks about the brave leap of going solo, her work for women in transport, and why the hardest experiences tend to teach the most.   Links: camilleri-appointments.co.uk, womenintransport.com

In this episode Liam Henderson and Johannah Randall are joined by Heerum Fleary, founder of TickEat and one of the Rail Innovation Group's newest members. Helping smaller businesses find their way into rail is the heart of what the Rail Innovation Group does, most often with digital and technology companies. Heerum does the same job from a different corner of the supply chain. She spent more than twenty years buying food and drink, much of it across travel, and TickEat, launched in 2015, puts that experience to work for smaller brands trying to get their products onto trains. The work is close and practical, from Meet the Buyer events and dinners on a static train in York, to masterclasses and a CPD-certified rail accelerator called Track to Go. The conversation gets into how a supplier earns a buyer's trust and where onboard catering is heading. It also lands on something we think about a lot. Heerum finds rail open and straightforward to work with, which runs against the experience many technology innovators describe, and Liam and Johannah dig into why the food and drink route in seems to run smoother. She also lays out what is coming, including a travel innovation hub fitted out with real onboard kit.   Links: tickeat.co.uk, railinnovationgroup.com  

This episode of What Moves Us welcomes Gregory Meyers, founder of TreeStock and the Rail Innovation Group's newest member. TreeStock builds digital twins of individual trees, using applied AI, lidar drones and satellite imagery to capture species, health, biomass and timber volume across whole forests. For rail, the case is direct. Millions of trees line the network, and a single storm can bring them down across the tracks at real cost. Gregory explains how mapping each tree could model wind blow risk, picking out which ones threaten the line before they fall. He also sets out the longer game, a goal to map every tree on the planet by 2030, and why so much tree surveying today still leans on methods that have barely changed in five hundred years. Before the interview, Deb, Johannah and Liam look back at the launch of the Rail Innovation Group's tenth anniversary series. It was a female founders event, held high above the city at the BT Tower.  The discussion turns on a stark figure, that female founders attract only about two per cent of all venture capital, and on a finding that flipped the premise of the event. Plenty here for anyone working where rail, data, investment and the natural environment meet.