Exploring three years of the Station Innovation Zone

0:11 – 0:30

The Station Innovation Zone program is in its third year. Having supported three cohorts and over 30 SMEs. It’s shown the value of clustering innovation in a real world setting. As part of our collaboration with Network Rail, we’ve been testing these innovations at Bristol Temple Meads. Network Rail’s aims are to make the railway simpler, better and greener.

0:30 – 0:35

And all of the SMEs bring a range of concepts and resolutions for each of those areas.

0:40 – 0:56

The catapults provided a great opportunity for the SMEs to really understand the issues in the station where their innovation will be trialled. And we’ve learned so much already, understanding how we can operate within a busy station environment. The the Connect to Places catapult team has really helped us to flesh out the ideas and grow the product.

1:03 – 1:21

So the trial hill at Bristol has given us an amazing opportunity to test with a wide range of staff and the support has been fantastic in terms of getting access to the information that we needed. So it’s an incredible opportunity. This is our very first trial in alive environments and we’ve learned huge amounts from that process.

1:25 – 1:55

Being part of the Station Innovation Zone program really propelled our business. It gave us a live environment to actually deploy our technology and test it. We were then able to get a large scale deployment at King’s Cross St Pancras station where we have our sensors running live doing real time crowd monitoring. So we started working with Scottrail and hopefully now a follow on project with Network Rail on Bristol Temple Mead and looking at Reading Station. We’ve raised some venture capital and we have now launched the product.

1:55 – 2:24

We couldn’t have done that without the catapult. So thank you very much. The programme has taught us as Network Rail, an awful lot about breaking down the barriers to innovation in our stations, so that our SMEs have got real life examples for testing their innovations and bringing them to market. We see stations of the future as sustainable, inclusive, accessible and efficient. Now that we’ve seen the impact that you can be achieved with such a program, this approach can be replicated into other rail settings, into the wider transport network.