19 September 2013
Winners of the 2013 Rail Customer Experience Competition announced
Winners of the 2013 Rail Customer Experience Competition were announced this
week at the Final Live Event, held at the popular 15Hatfields venue near the South
Bank.
The event, held on Tuesday 17 September, was the pinnacle of the £1million prizebearing competition, led by the rail industry’s Enabling Innovation team, which
looked for innovative solutions to transform the passenger and freight customer
experience within GB rail in areas of service culture, business process, journey
planning, seamless journey experience and design of facilities.
In total, sixteen finalists from 111 entries were involved in the Final Live Event,
competing for a total purse of £300,000 in cash prizes, plus the opportunity to bid for
funding from a total investment pool of £700,000. But rewards were also to be found
in the invaluable networking opportunities the event presented – opening the door for
potential partnerships, collaborations, sales and further investments.
In addition to a 10 minute pitch, each finalist had a private Q&A session with a panel
of expert judges that provided the finalists with an opportunity to lay bare their
business idea, identify its strengths and weaknesses, and take this knowledge
gained to work and improve upon it. After careful deliberation, the winners were
decided by the respective judging panels and announced at the evening’s award
ceremony.
In the Regular Rail Passenger Challenge, which addressed the experience of regular
rail passengers such as commuters, Caution Your Blast and Ayoupa won with their
mobile app - ‘Commuter Intelligent Passenger’. This offers real-time journey
monitoring on intermodal door-to-door journeys and personalised information, advice
and alerts from its intelligent predictive capabilities. The two runner-ups in this
Challenge were Jeppesen and Gerrit Boehm.
The Discretionary Rail Passenger Challenge, which tackled more occasional
passengers’ experience, was won by 3Squared with their ‘Station Master’
smartphone app, taking the concept of route planning provided by popular apps such
as Google Maps and applying this technology and concept to station layouts enabling tourists and those with impairments to find platforms, amenities and access
routes. The two runner-ups in this Challenge were Capito Systems and 4ward
Thinking.
The Rail Freight Customer Challenge was won by the Stobart Group for their
‘Stobart Express’ innovation, involving high speed trains and/or small modular load
units combined with low-emission road delivery vehicles, to enable fast and lowemission door-to-door distribution of multiple small-volume loads, to local stores,
other business premises and residential properties. The runner-up in this Challenge
was FreightArranger.
The ‘Cross-over Prize’, rewarding exceptional proposals that transferred innovations
developed for another application to the rail industry, was awarded to routeRANK.
Having already successfully applied their innovation and technology in the travel
industry, routeRANK provides a software solution for freight transport planning.
Incorporating road, sea and air transport data, their ‘Integrated Rail Freight Planner’
would be able to compute multi-modal shipment route options and propose real-time
alternatives in the case of disruption.
In addition to the pitches, there was a discussion panel on the barriers to innovation
in achieving a seamless end-to-end journey, featuring David Clarke from EIT, John
Boon from Network Rail, Richard Kemp-Harper from the Technology Strategy Board,
Sharon Hedges from Passenger Focus, Geoff Inskip from Centro and chaired by
InnoCentive’s Jonathan Slater. David Simoes-Brown, Founder and Strategy Partner
at 100% Open, and Ian Downey, the UK Ambassador for ESA's Integrated
Applications Promotion programme, joined as the keynote speakers for the day.
Altogether, it demonstrated the high capacity for innovation amongst the world’s
entrepreneurs and indicated a promising future for customer experience on the GB
railway. By bringing together rail and non-rail sectors, there was significant
opportunity for knowledge exchange and drawing new talent into rail. Winners will
now go on to bid for funding from the £700,000 investment pool.
David Clarke, Director of EIT, congratulated all the winners as well as everyone else
who had taken part in the competition: ‘For the winners, this is a tremendous
opportunity to kick-start some really significant concepts and turn them into a
commercial reality that can be applied full-scale on the railway. There’s a diversity in
the nature of rail customers both in freight and passengers, and the variety in the
responses to this challenge truly reflects this: there is no one-size fits all for rail
customers and I was particularly pleased to see a number of truly cross-modal
proposals which recognise that rail customers are in fact transport customers. This
has been a really successful competition and it’s a great case study for any doubter
out there that wonders whether we’ve really got any innovation waiting in the wings
worth discovering.’
The competition forms part of the portfolio of activities to unlock innovation led by the
Enabling Innovation Team (EIT) on behalf of the Technical Strategy Leadership
Group, for the rail industry to fulfil its 30-year vision for a world-class national rail
system, building and deploying the best innovation, technology, people, principles
and processes.
-Ends-
Media enquiries, please contact the RSSB press office, on
020 3142 5333 / 5332 / 5331 or email pressoffice@rssb.co.uk
Notes to editors:
1. Videos with the winners are available on the Future Railway YouTube site:
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheFutureRailway?feature=watch
2. The Final Live Event was held at 15 Hatfields in London on 17 September, 2013. The
winners are: Caution Your Blast & Ayoupa, 3Squared, Stobbart Group, and routeRANK.
3. Further details on runners-up:
Regular Rail Passenger Challenge
Jeppesen UK: The Jeppesen Journey Planning Business unit is part of a worldwide
subsidiary of Boeing and focuses on public transport journey planning. They offer to minimise
the impact of disruption through their “Rail Journey Assistant”, a mobile app and API providing
real time journey planning and multi-modal route alternatives.
Gerrit Bohem: Recently graduated with a PhD in Design Research and Interaction Design at
Middlesex University, Gerrit Boehm proposes to improve pedestrian flow and the travelling
experience by using “Ambient Persuasive Guidance” to provide more comprehensive
information to passengers, such as real-time updates on the availability of space in train
carriages.
Discretionary Rail Passenger Challenge
Capito Systems: This innovation from Capito Systems enables users to use free-form
spoken language to request live information or purchase tickets, as well as bringing in
additional user interaction features to simplify, optimise and personalise the mobile user
experience.
4ward Thinking: SAMi Posters combines traditional billboard posters with an interactive
SAMi Card, utilising QR codes, NFC technology and SMS text so that customers can receive
a portable record of the poster information directly to their internet enabled device.
Rail Freight Passenger Challenge
Freight Arranger: FreightArranger is a unique cloud-based decision support tool that would
make intermodal freight services using rail more visible and rapidly accessible, enabling
modal shift and higher train fill rates
4. The Customer Experience competition was led and funded by the rail industry’s Enabling
Innovation Team, and was developed and managed by InnoCentive and IXC UK. Further
details about the competition can be found on the EIT website:
http://www.futurerailway.org/customers
5. The Enabling Innovation Team has been set up by the rail industry to accelerate the uptake of
innovation. Our mission is to offer support to practical cross-industry demonstrator projects,
building on the work of the Technical Strategy Leadership Group, but also seeking out
innovative ideas and proposals from across the industry. Our approach is to: understand the
challenges that industry faces; connect potential innovators with these challenges; and, where
necessary with potential funding. The EIT is hosted by RSSB, and reports into TSLG, and is
supported by the Rail Delivery Group, Planning Oversight Group, and RSSB’s Board as well
as the Department for Transport.
6. IXC UK is recognised as a leading practitioner of open innovation and collaborative
development.
7. InnoCentive is the global leader in crowdsourcing innovation problems to the world’s smartest
people who compete to provide ideas and solutions to important business, social, policy,
scientific, and technical challenges.