UK: Innovation must have a purpose, GBRX Managing Director Toufic Machnouk told the Railway Industry Association Innovation Conference in Newport on March 25.
Formally announced by Rail Minister Lord Hendy late last year, GBRX is being established as part of the emerging rail reform programme to act as a strategic innovation body in rail. Machnouk has been appointed as Managing Director, having previously been Digital Railway Lead at Network Rail.
Reflecting on his involvement in digital rail initiatives including the roll-out of ETCS on the East Coast Main Line, he told delegates that while rail ‘was an industry steeped in innovation’, it had become increasingly difficult to innovate in the sector in recent times.
‘You can train a driver on how to use ETCS in a matter of days’, he said, ‘but rolling that technology out at a system level at pace feels almost like an impossible task.’ The role of GBRX, he explained, would be to try to address these ‘whole system’ barriers to innovation, with what he termed a ‘purposeful focus’ on ‘the nature of the problems’ facing the industry.
He cautioned that even in an integrated industry where many of the interfaces that exist today have been removed, innovation would still be extremely difficult. ‘Rail is a complex industry anyway because it has a massive installed base and it is safety critical, so it is no surprise that change is hard.
‘Innovation itself is a tricky term’, Machnouk continued. ‘It conjures up images of people doing wacky stuff in their garage.’ But in reality, the problem facing the rail industry is that it is struggling even to implement ‘things that we know are doable’.
Nevertheless, he believes that the reform agenda offers ‘a generational opportunity’ to deliver change ‘across the track-train interface’. Several months of work has already been done to assess areas in which GBRX could intervene. The body will ‘have a methodology specifically designed to overcome barriers’, he insisted. A key element of this would be to identify ‘problem owners’ across the sector, including in the supply chain. ‘We must work in the field with the supply industry — GBRX cannot be a glossy brochure and a website.’
Concluding his keynote address, Machnouk urged delegates to ‘really think deeply about the problems we are trying to solve’.
