If you want change… stop changing everything!
If you want to know about innovation in transport, the best person to talk to is River Tamoor Baig.
River exploded onto the transport scene 6 years ago as the creator of in-vehicle hackathon events HackTrain, and rapidly turned his startup Hack Partners into an innovation powerhouse.
In just a few short years, he created a suite of technology products for the rail sector employing several dozen software developers and a multi-million pound turnover.
I’ve known River from throughout his time in our sector and he’s always a joy to talk to. I’ve no doubt that, one day, he’ll return to the tech sector from which he came, so I grabbed the chance for a conversation as part of The Freewheeling Podcast. My key goal was to understand the barriers to innovation in our sector.
River had a number of key insights.
One interesting point was about the whole public v private debate that consumes so much energy in transport. River’s perspective (and I paraphrase): if you want change, stop bloody changing everything!
Rail and bus can work either nationalised or privatised. We just need to pick one and let it thrive. What we’ve got right now is this kind of whipping effect where we look to the left, we look to the right and we don’t really get anywhere as a result because we’re constantly changing the structure.
While he’s not in favour of making public v private changes, he is concerned that transport is over-centralised: too few providers creating too few decision-makers. He compares it with the health sector:
The NHS is branded as this one, big encompassing bureaucracy but really it’s made up of hundreds of hospitals, thousands of GP practices and hundreds of research universities. So as an entrepreneur, you can provide a service to any one of these entities, do a reasonably good job and scale up your business. Whereas in rail, you have about 22 customers and that’s it.
He finds that the solutions are often to be found at the front-line but the innovations to solve problems that front line managers know how to solve are abandoned in a soul-sapping trudge through the business case process:
It’s just too painful. You lose momentum, you lose interest, you lose energy.
The problem, he says, is that relatively small sums of money for a trial of a new idea takes much too long for momentum to be maintained:
When someone has a good idea, the pathway from idea to getting funded trials needs be as short as humanely possible: a week or two, not two to three months which is what it takes now.
Interestingly, the problem, he feels, comes out of good motivations: the desire for consensus in an industry constantly aware that it spends taxpayers’ money:
We need to stop asking everyone what they think. This industry dies through consensus. We need everyone to say yes whereas we should need just the right people to say yes. What you need is the person who has the problem and the person who is in a leadership position to agree that this is a problem and a solution needs to be found. We should have just two people making the decision and going ahead with it, whereas right now, we’ve got countless boards to make it happen.
Too much consensus?
He feels there’s a real waste at the moment with private sector money being left on the table:
Private investors won’t give transport the money, simple as that. It’s too slow, not enough speed, too much bureaucracy, too much regulation.
So if we want a more innovative transport sector we need to stop worrying about ownership, encourage smaller companies able to make nimbler decisions while corporates need to become willing to countenance small scale innovation pilots based on the instincts of their front-line managers.
To hear more of what River has to say (including where on earth he got the name River!), listen to The Freewheeling Podcast.
