The UK is committing to infrastructure on a scale rarely seen before. The national pipeline sets out at least £725 billion of planned public investment over the next decade, spanning energy, transport, water, health and the networks that connect them.

For the businesses that design, build and improve infrastructure, this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity, the demand is clear, and the direction is set.

At the same time, the sector faces many interrelated challenges, not least around productivity, carbon reduction and safety. To overcome these challenges and deliver the pipeline, our sector needs to work differently. No one organisation can solve these challenges on their own. By working together we can reduce risk, scale what works, deliver better, and benefit UK businesses and our economy.

The adoption problem

Across the sector, solutions that could make infrastructure more productive, greener and safer already exist. Many have already been tested and evidenced on major projects. What holds them back is not always whether they work, but whether there is a reliable route from evidence to adoption.

Too often, a solution is trialled on one project, the project ends and the learning leaves with it. The next client then starts again, sometimes testing something similar without knowing what has already been done. The constraint is not a shortage of ideas or demand, but the absence of structured routes from a successful pilot to wider use and repeatable commercial contracts.

These challenges are explored alongside the opportunities for innovation in infrastructure in our new report on The Future of Infrastructure Innovation.

Report

Continuous improvement for UK infrastructure

Turning shared challenges into better delivery, wider adoption and business growth.

Supporting high-potential businesses to scale

Here at Connected Places Catapult, our role is to help tackle infrastructure challenges by supporting high-potential businesses with solutions in this space to succeed and scale. Our research shows that many of the same delivery challenges recur across programmes of this scale, and recurring challenges create repeatable markets for the businesses that can solve them.

Our work is intended to connect market intelligence, shared industry challenges, live adoption opportunities and business support into a more coordinated route from evidence to wider use.

Through engagement with the infrastructure client community through networks including i3P (the Infrastructure Industry Innovation Partnership) we have identified priority areas for coordinated action. These areas, which are outlined in our report, ‘The Future of Infrastructure Innovation’, include carbon reduction and productivity gains which are the most developed in the current evidence base and represent the strongest case for action.

Just last week, we launched the Diesel-free Sites Adoption Programme, designed to support firms with proven diesel-free construction solutions to demonstrate their solutions on a live infrastructure project with Anglian Water and Costain. And today, we’re launching the Infrastructure Productivity Scale-up Programme, designed to support SMEs with proven productivity solutions scale across UK infrastructure clients.

As our report sets out, there is much more that can be done to help proven solutions move from isolated pilots to repeatable deployment. If we can open up even a fraction of the UK’s £725bn infrastructure pipeline to innovation, we can create new markets for high-potential businesses while delivering better, faster, safer, and more sustainable infrastructure.