Episode Five: Opportunity for Innovation
How to Build a Railway is a twelve-part podcast series exploring the story behind the construction of the UK’s new high speed rail line.
We are always looking towards new methods and technologies to help us work smarter, safer and more efficiently. Construction and engineering is no different.
This episode of How to build a railway, ‘Opportunity for Innovation’, dives into some of the ways High Speed Two is working to create collaborative innovation partnerships using new technology and processes. This will enable a better and safer way of working for its staff during construction and ensure the best experience possible for all passengers once the railway is operational, leaving a lasting legacy for the construction and rail industries.
Featuring
- Howard Mitchell, HS2 Head of Innovation
- Charlotte Hills, HS2 Senior Innovation Manager
- Heather Donald, HS2 Senior Innovation Manager
- Ed McCann, ICE President
Charlotte describes the benefits of working close with the supply chain and how the use of Lean production allows site teams to watch themselves at work. Giving them the opportunity to collaboratively ask the question “How can we do it better?”
Ed outlines the background of ICE and how HS2 intersects within its three main points:
- Qualifying members
- Connections to clients
- The political space
Howard explains the strategy behind innovation. Driving the themes and the topics that have the biggest impact to HS2 as a programme, and also the maximum benefit to the UK from this huge investment in the UK infrastructure landscape.
Heather talks through The Euston Living Lab project. Using LIDAR sensors to monitor the trends of the current Euston station to make better decisions for the future passenger experience. Displaying that the innovations are not just for the construction of the railway, but also when it’s operational.
Episode Five – Opportunity for Innovation (transcript)
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Episode transcript
This is a transcript of episode five of HS2’s How to build a railway podcast, first published on 28 March 2023.
Fran Scott
Hello, I’m Fran Scott, and this is How to Build a Railway.
Industries are always looking towards new innovations to help them work smarter, safer and more efficiently. And nowhere has this been more apparent than within the manufacturing sector. Ever since Henry Ford introduced the world to production lines, they have been continuously adapted as innovative new technology is integrated to improve efficiency and reduce waste.
However when it comes to constructing a house, a hospital or even a railway, that process does not take place in a fixed factory. No two building sites are ever the same, and so—understandably—comparable improvements have been slower to implement within the construction industry.
But things are changing and today we will dive into some of the ways HS2 is working to create collaborative innovation partnerships using new technology. This not only enables better and safer ways of working for its staff during construction and ensures the best experience possible for all passengers once the railway is operational, but will also leave a lasting legacy for the construction and rail industries, one where efficiency is measured not just financially but also environmentally.
1:37
Fran Scott
Where do great ideas come from? Often, when we tell stories of innovation, we focus on inventors. It’s a way of thinking that dates back to the Renaissance, and which celebrates individual genius. But more often, real innovation doesn’t even involve physical new inventions, it can be innovative processes or systems and comes from teams working together. We can see that across sites on HS2.
One of the project’s partners, is implementing techniques developed in the manufacturing sector. Techniques that at first glance might not seem that innovative.
2:31
Charlotte Hills
It’s taking what might look on the surface, like not a particularly ground breaking or, you know, highest level of innovation product, but delivering really impactful change by using it in a novel way.
2:43
Fran Scott
This is Charlotte Hills, Senior Innovation Manager at HS2. On this project, she has worked with project partner BBV, as they transfer efficiency processes from manufacturing and look at ways to implement them on construction sites. In particular the project has drawn on the ‘Lean’ approach, which is an approach widely used in manufacturing to deliver the product in the best way possible, one that comes with a whole series of tried and trusted principles and techniques.
In this particular project she was implementing lean techniques on earthmoving operations.
3:29
Charlotte Hills
So it’s part of a lean productivity strategy that BBV were developing and it’s the basically was the use of synced cameras that you would deploy in a particular area on site that are time-stamped to the millisecond, so that you knew that all those cameras are capturing shots at exactly the same point in time.
It allowed them to basically do time and motion studies of—as an example—earthworks, so they would be able to watch on several cameras, they’re seeing all the different angles of movement of earthworks around the site, and then watch that footage back collaboratively with the team actually undertaking those earthwork movements, and with a lean, sort of continuous improvement, productivity manager to identify where there were opportunities to improve the productivity and the efficiency of that process.
4:25
Fran Scott
Lean relies on conducting kaizen, which is continuous change, interventions and improvements. In these sessions, a lean manager organises a group of staff members to analyse the processes they work on, and improve their productivity.
Done well, it is a collaborative process where everyone shares ideas and develops better processes together.
But for staff who are not familiar with the process, it can be daunting.
4:55
Charlotte Hills
The difficulties that they had with that project at the start, were people starting to worry that they were being watched, you know, ‘Are people being judged?’, “Are they going to be told off for not doing things properly?’, but the way it was deployed, was taking that technology, and actually really working collaboratively with the team that were doing the work so that it became a bit like watching the match back afterwards, with the team to look at, ‘How can we improve it? How can we do it better?’, and really identifying where those opportunities were.
5:20
Fran Scott
The lean manager on this project working with HS2 was Simon Thorne, of BBV. Thorne is now head of innovation and transformation for the joint venture. and he has a good metaphor for the process, as Howard Mitchell, HS2’s head of innovation explains.
5:38
Howard Mitchell
It’s more akin to a sports team being able to watch their performance, and then adapt, or somebody seeing their golf swing back. It’s much easier to take on feedback and change your behaviours when you can see them in real time.
6:03
Fran Scott
On this demonstration project, HS2 and its partners had estimated annual savings of seven million pounds. That’s half a million pounds of taxpayers’ money, saved every month, just on earth movements on one site…
…just by monitoring how a team works together, and helping them to spot better ways of working.
And that seven million pounds is just the start.
6:29
Charlotte Hills
The calculations that we took, were taking a very conservative estimate, but he predicted that they would easily improve the way that they were moving earthworks by at least 10%.
The figures that we’ve got, as Howard says, are based on the implementation that we know about, but they are now deploying it across the whole contract. So the potential is much greater than that.
6:53
Fran Scott
Ed McCann is a former president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, or ICE. He, and his organisation, has worked closely with HS2 as it develops its innovation strategy.
7:07
Ed McCann
The ICE basically does three things. It qualifies members, so it effectively establishes that people are professionally competent to do their job. HS2 and its supply chain is an employer of a lot of those people. So there’s an interest there.
The ICE plays a key role in sort of the collection, generation, dissemination of best practice, in the world of infrastructure. And so again, strong connections into the major clients and delivery organisations literally going back over a century really. So talking about what’s the right way to do things. How do we capture best practice? How do we disseminate best practice?
And the third thing that it does, is it has a key role to play in, if you like, the policy space, and trying to make sure that the right infrastructure is done in the right way, not just in the UK but internationally.
HS2 is a major, very significant programme nationally and internationally. And so, it fits within a political and policy debate about what the nation should be doing and so on. So, the ICE, in all of those different areas, intersects with major delivery programmes like HS2.
8:15
Fran Scott
Ed’s role with the ICE has allowed him to see the challenges the construction and engineering sectors face, as they try to foster innovation.
20:25
Ed McCann
It’s a project-based industry on the whole.
That creates an immediate challenge to, how do I get scale benefits? And how do I get a scale market? If I, if I literally am selling my idea, at a project delivery level into ten thousand, you know, million pound projects or something, you know, that’s hugely problematic, I haven’t got two or three people that I can go to, get that sale done, get that sort of line to market down. It’s very fragmented.
And it’s focused on projects. And a lot of the benefits are at the project level. So if you go and see a major contractor and say, here’s my innovation, they said, ‘Well, I’m sorry, I’m a corporate hack. The work is done by the project teams, go and speak to them’. And they’ll sit there and say, ‘Well, I’m doing this project, its lasting six months, when will you be ready for me’ and you say, ‘Well, I’m sorry, we need a year to implement this in your… prove it. and get it going’.
And you run into all of those sorts of problems of fragmentation, project focus, rather than process focus. To say nothing of the fact that the people, it’s not clear who buys the, the thing that you might be selling. It’s surprisingly difficult to find the person who would be interested in and buy, and buy what you’ve got, and very often, new tech providers turn up to say, ‘Buy this thing’, not understanding that that actually wipes out the business model of the person they’re trying to sell something to.
And so a lot of the productivity-enhancing technologies are absolutely business model disruptive. And don’t be surprised when people are sitting there saying, ‘I’m not sure I really want to buy something that means that we won’t have work in a year’s time’.
It’s a complex environment. The role of the client, the big buyer of the ultimate service, is really critical in this then, because of the sort of fragmented nature of what lies beneath.
10:14
Fran Scott
It’s the challenge for clients like HS2 to master that complexity. Innovation may be key to any business’s growth, or any project’s success. But it’s not enough just to come up with ideas.
10:26
Howard Mitchell
So innovation, is part of business. It’s something that we do, it’s part of the DNA of our organisation. However, lots of people have lots of ideas, and how you prioritise and choose those ideas to deliver the maximum benefit to the programme is the art of innovation.
10:52
Fran Scott
As a publicly-funded organisation, HS2 must demonstrate value in all its spending decisions. That might be financial value, helping to keep costs to a minimum. Or it might be a public good, something that adds value in another way.
But there are some that really stand out for the innovation team.
One of the ways innovations developed at HS2 add value is by reducing carbon emissions, and other environmental harms. We’ll be looking at some more of these in Episode 10 – Keeping it Clean.
11:26
Fran Scott
Charlotte has been working with HS2’s head of civil structures to examine how bridge designers can use a tool called ‘Altair’, an AI tool which can generate ideas for bridge designs.
It considers thousands of permutations of design, according to parameters like volume of steel or concrete needed. In an hour, it can produce a mass of new ideas, which would normally take days or weeks to develop.
12:03
Charlotte Hills
A design iteration that normally would have taken two weeks for bridge designers, it can be done using AI technology in under an hour. And it just puts all the different parameters in so you can look at, whereas before bridge designers wouldn’t have had time to think ‘Well, what if we just had three spans?’, you just say, ‘Well, we don’t have time to look at the sort of outlier design options,’. You just go for things that you know are going to work. And this is allowing them to look at really different solutions, using different sets of parameters.
It’s allowing us to challenge the designs, that the designers come up with. So with the tool, you can actually say, Okay, what is the most optimal outcome, given all the engineering sort of, you know, rules of play. And we want to optimise it for carbon, or we want to optimise it for the least amount of steel that we would use, or whatever, and you can just play with all these different parameters to see what the options are. But in vastly faster time than can be done manually.
13:05
Fran Scott
Another public good that HS2 considers when investing in innovation is safety. We’ll be looking at ways the railway is helping keep its workers—and everyone coming into contact with the railway healthy and safe, in Episode 11 – Safe at Heart.
But one way workers are being kept safe on site is by making use of an off-the-shelf headset known as HoloLens. Howard explains how this surprising use of this virtual and augmented reality can be implemented to improve safety.
13:43
Howard Mitchell
The construction environment still continues to be a quite dangerous space, because you are moving a lot of very heavy and large items around, in the same space as human beings. And it becomes obviously a risk.
Innovation has certainly provided a huge opportunity for us to better manage the construction environment, and certainly keep people safe. So in terms of preventing risks, and almost role playing, how a series of events has to happen, prior to people being put in harm’s way, in a realistic environment. We’re starting to use augmented and virtual reality spaces for our engineers to work through high risk activities with large movements—cranes, beam installations, and groundworks, for example—prior to them actually stepping out, into the site.
We get the teams together, and we’ve created a virtual reality environment in which they can then blow-by-blow play that through before they actually step out. And then in terms of the broader training, and in particularly challenging environments, such as tunnelling, we’re using augmented reality.
Augmented reality is particularly good in the tunnel environment where some of your senses—because you’re in a large tunnel—are automatically reduced. The augmented reality gives you information about specific egress and ingress points, it can show you where fire safety equipment is, and it overlays that very much in a way that you’re starting to see in other technologies and other sectors.
15:49
Fran Scott
The key is to focus not on who has a good idea, but on challenges that need good ideas.
15:56
Ed McCann
The way that innovation has been done, on these big programmes historically, I would say has been in recent years, it’s been about providing an environment for startup technology to come to the surface and have a go and talk about itself, and all the rest of it.
It’s in a sense been vendor-led. And it’s about sort of seeing the tech and can we use it? And it’s that kind of marketplace, I think what HS2 has done, to move it to the next level, is added another dimension in which they said, ‘Actually what’s the challenge that we’re trying to address here? And can we create a demand signal into the technology market? To say actually we’d like an answer to this problem, please.
And I think that’s a very important shift.
16:40
Fran Scott
HS2’s size and complexity gives it an advantage here. It can identify challenges. It can find good ideas that may overcome these challenges. It can try those ideas out on a small scale, and roll them out once they have been proven.
It can see the innovation process to completion, in a way that smaller, shorter, projects cannot.
17:05
Howard Mitchell
We are client led and delivery focused. We set the agenda, but we also focus very much on it becoming business as usual. So we follow that innovation journey from a great idea all the way through to it becoming used on a daily basis on site. The HS2 programme is quite unique in that it has that opportunity to do that. In comparison to other organisations that are either smaller, they don’t have the scale of HS2, or shorter, meaning that they may not have that longevity to see it to completion.
17:38
Fran Scott
As HS2 works to foster ideas that solve multiple challenges, it can refine its innovation strategy.
17:46
Ed McCann
This is, I’m gonna say, rigorous, sometimes probably ruthless about making sure that the innovation once it’s had a chance to, to see what it is, before it gets serious investment, it gets properly scrutinised.
And then there’s a lot of effort here into getting it delivered in practice, and delivered at scale, which, again, is something that is really challenging. Sometimes it’s easy to get it working on a, in a, bench run. But getting it from there into complex commercial and corporate environments on real life projects going, like the clappers, at scale. That’s that’s a huge challenge. And I think, it’s something that, I think, HS2 have had a really really good go at, and have had a lot of success around.
18:28
Fran Scott
So, does innovation spring from the minds of individual creators? Or should we look for the roots of innovation more widely, across an organisation?
18:40
Ed McCann
There’s a difference between an idea which you might well have sitting in a darkened room, and impact. And you get impact through the sort of innovation processes which require, a range of skills beyond ideation. You know, it’s about how do I land it and, and frankly, in programmes like this, the idea is the smallest part, it is that actually getting an idea from, you know, the thought bubble into action on really complex, very serious, often life critical processes and operations is a major challenge.
19:18
Howard Mitchell
Whatever you come up with has to be bought by organisations at scale. It has to be robust. And those are the elements that require for someone who’s more of a custodian of an idea, than the originator of the idea.
19:36
Ed McCann
The hard yards on getting value out of ideas is in that process.
19:42
Fran Scott
HS2’s nature as a publicly-funded organisation drives real attention to detail.
Heather Donald is HS2’s Senior Innovation Manager.
19:54
Heather Donald
We’re commercially focused. So we look for a return on investment, either in terms of cost or carbon, for any of our innovation projects. And that’s really key to us being successful.
20:06
Howard Mitchell
We drive this highly collaborative approach. So in return for the funding that we’ve given them, they have a very clear business case and return on investment. But also we structure the team that delivers that innovation. So it’s not just the idea provider, it’s often we then bring an academic institution to the table as part of the project, as well as small businesses and also other people from within the programme.
We don’t put contracts with those small businesses. We work with them to win that work from our supply chain. So you’ve got blue chip, tier one construction companies, who like the diligence that HS2 provide in those businesses and subsequently they win the contract.
They win the work on their own merit in a standard procurement process, but the fact that they understand that procurement process a lot better, and they also understand the market and they’ve spoken to their clients through our programme means that they’re much better at selling and so therefore they do win new work.
21:23
Heather Donald
We hold Innovation Challenge scoping workshops, where we get the universities and our corporate supply chain together, in order to ideate around some of HS2’s biggest challenges. So we held one of those quite recently, and we’re getting a big portfolio of work falling out of that. It’s about getting people in a room talking about ideas, and then being able to make good matches in terms of where we can specialise in the work.
They are quite structured, because you do need to go through a kind of robust, creative-thinking process in order to get actually to the, the correct innovation challenges. So we get everyone together, and we talk and we walk them through an ‘innovation ideation’, as it’s called.
22:07
Fran Scott
By bringing different teams together, Heather, and HS2, can drive innovations that focus first on passengers, not on what engineers or start-ups are most excited about.
Like the lean construction Charlotte described, it does use technology. This uses LIDAR (light detection and ranging) which is a bit like radar but uses lasers instead and is used in autonomous vehicles—not as an innovation in itself, but as a driver of innovative processes.
22:47
Heather Donald
One project that I’m working on at the minute is called the Euston Living Lab. And it is about putting passengers, and not trains, at the heart of HS2.
We’re doing some clever stuff in terms of technology. So we’ve borrowed some stuff from the automotive industry. So we’re using LIDAR sensors in Euston station. So we’re monitoring the forecourt, and the concourse, and some of the gatelines. And the sensors are really helping us understand how people flow around the station today. And then what we do is we combine that with a layer of artificial intelligence and analytics in order to get us into a dashboard which gives us information on how people are experiencing Euston station today, and that’s helping us inform decisions.
We are looking through the LIDAR sensors at how people experience the station. So we’re looking at their dwell time. We’re looking at the routes they’re navigating.
23:59
Fran Scott
The Lab started with a challenge that north London commuters—and others, at busy city centre stations around the world—face every day.
24:14
Heather Donald
Where are the points in the station, where we’re getting congestion? Where are the points of the station that are underutilised? How do we get people not just standing and looking at screens? How do we get them interacting, in the concessions. So the different parts of Euston station we want, we don’t want past customers standing looking at screens, we want them moving around the station and using all of the facilities.
24:36
Fran Scott
The Lab can take that real world monitoring, and then test the effect of any intervention.
24:43
Heather Donald
We’re able to see by, if you change something in the station, so you change a sign, what difference does that make for passenger flow around that station? One thing we think it will be very useful for is also construction phasing. So we know that you are often going to be doing changes to a station, whilst there’s an ongoing operation in that station. So by understanding what even just a very small change makes to people-flow, it will help you better phase that construction.
25:15
Fran Scott
The tool has been designed to be accessible to anyone involved in work at that station. It allows real world data on commuters’ movements to be combined with a virtual model of the station. That allows the teamwork that is at the heart of real innovation.
25:34
Heather Donald
We are equipping people with, in effect, a dashboard through an easy web interface. And what this dashboard enables people to do is, is do ‘what-if?’ scenarios. So, they can play around with the variables, and see what differences that would make.
25:52
Fran Scott
The approach the Euston Living Lab have developed could have widespread application, wherever multiple organisations must work together to improve the safe and efficient flow of people.
26:04
Heather Donald
We’ve always thought that this technology could be very useful for lots of different industries. So anywhere where you’ve got crowds, you understanding how the crowd flows around is going to be very helpful. And so sports grounds, etc., it would be very useful to use there. And then also in construction phasing, so we could use it to phase the different stages of construction for Euston station, or any other station in the UK.
It’s about being data centric. So understanding how people are behaving today by understanding the data.
26:48
Fran Scott
Sharing these innovation successes is at the heart of HS2’s strategy
26:55
Heather Donald
One thing that we do to offer value is we de-risk in one of our major contracts, and then we roll it out across the rest of the programme. And I think that’s one of the things that we are doing really differently is sharing the innovations that are successful, right across all of HS2.
27:17
Howard Mitchell
Companies that would naturally probably be quite competitive. And by driving that culture, where they’re starting to share and develop that idea, you get a really successful uptake. But because we as the client lead it, we own the right to then scale it thereafter.
Previously, that idea may have just sat with one part of a programme or one company we’ve managed to be able to pull that idea up a level and make it programme-wide and then share it with the likes of Network Rail or Highways England.
27:47
Heather Donald
We’re open about the return that we’re generating for the UK. So we think it’s really important to show that innovation is saving us money. You know, innovation is great at helping us, you know, solve some of the difficult challenges that we have. And yes, it gives us a return. So I think it’s really important that we make those numbers and the business case available to others. So they can also see what that would look like for them.
28:17
Fran Scott
HS2 has developed its approach to start-ups in a way that has delivered these sorts of measurable results to the British economy: hundreds of jobs, and hundreds of millions of new private investment.
28:32
Howard Mitchell
We have an accelerator programme as part of the innovation team. And to date, we’ve worked with 25 small businesses, startup businesses, that would normally not really get a foothold in such a complex and large industry. And of those organisations, we continue to track their growth.
That’s part of the Halo benefit of us working with them. So of those 25 businesses, I think they have secured a significant amount of additional follow-on funding from private investors. So venture capitalists, because of the association with a programme, and they are growing with that money and hiring people in the UK.
I think at the last count, there was around 400 jobs now that exist, that didn’t exist before the accelerator programme. So it gives an indication that the very large HS2 programme is working with a tiniest sort of organisations and the synergy between the two creates growth on one side, but also savings within the programme to the taxpayer. And then, to our knowledge, around 100 million of external venture capital funding has gone into those small businesses.
30:02
Fran Scott
The breadth of the HS2 project, and its commitment to seeing innovations through, has also allowed it to both build connections between universities, and connect universities with the private sector.
30:16
Heather Donald
One thing that we’ve done quite early on is set up some really good frameworks to enable us to work easily with universities around the UK. So on the rail innovation side, we work through UKRRIN, to work with universities, including University of Birmingham, and on the construction side, through a framework called UKCRIC, that enables us to work with universities right across the UK.
We’re working with Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, we’re working with the University of Southampton, working with the University of Leeds, we’re really spreading that knowledge right around the UK, because we want universities no matter where they’re based on in the country to be able to work with us.
One of the problems that you have with working with different universities is getting work stepped up and started quickly.
Whereas these frameworks enable us to access, I think there’s about 25 different universities right around the UK, because we’re all signatories to the framework. So it enables us to set up feasibility studies with universities within a matter of weeks. So it really is helping us accelerate innovation coming from the universities onto HS2.
31:27
Fran Scott
For Ed McCann, the process itself is its own, significant, innovation. It is one that other major projects can now build on.
31:36
Ed McCann
Possibly for the first time, HS2 has come to place innovation as an important tool within an overall productivity improvement frame. So if the aim is to be more effective in your projects, is to be more efficient in your projects. Well, how do we do that? And in HS2, you’ve got the kind of dissemination of best practice idea, which is ‘Oh, someone’s doing it already over there. That’s a great idea. How do we make sure everyone does it like that?’, which is about best practice, it’s not an innovation process. It’s about deploying best practice well.
But then you’ve got this other stream of activity, which is the innovation process, which recognises that it hasn’t been done in this context before, there are enhanced risks associated with this change, or the application of this technology. And so we need to work very hard to manage those risks down, to develop the implementation strategy, to make sure that the business investment cases make, make sense.
It’s the first time I’ve seen it in the UK, where you have a kind of productivity frame, best practice dissemination, and driving that into the organisation. And this innovation is a separate process line with a different set of skills, different set of processes, and which I think is all about, that’s ‘How do we systemize the benefits of the process, that is innovation into infrastructure?’.
It feels like something that—on the back of HS2—is feeding into how the infrastructure sector understands the role of innovation as part of an overall productivity improvement approach.
33:11
Fran Scott
Next time on How to Build a Railway…
33:20
Martin Herrenknecht
High performance tunnels define how people and things move around. There is huge demand to build subterranean infrastructure faster.
39:33
Martyn Noak
A cutting is excavated, and then some blinding cast on the base to form a really flat surface. Each precast element is three metres in length. They have reinforcement, they weigh between 16 and 43 tonnes each and they’re constructed in a dedicated factory.
34:00
Eddie Woods
The design of the caverns is this thing that is very, very… neat. And it’s probably taken it beyond anything that’s ever been done before.
34:12
Martyn Noak
Within the first 200m of the drive, they had to under cross the M25. So obviously, that can’t be allowed to deform or settle in any way.
They’ve also under-crossed the Misbourne River and a couple of places with very low cover.
34:32
Anders
I’m most impressed with the people […] all the skilled people were gathered around the world to be able to execute the project like this, we are in between four and 5000 people employed, if you include the supply chain, and overall the project is employing 29,000 people.
35:06
Fran Scott
Your host has been me, Fran Scott
Thanks to our guests Heather Donald, Charlotte Hills, Howard Mitchell, and Ed McCann.
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