Catapulting Innovation Through Collaboration
In December 2021, global technology company Thales collaborated with the Digital Catapult, the UK authority on advanced digital technology, to hold a competition aimed at helping small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to engage with the Rail Industry.
The SMEs were invited to pitch ideas that could improve Rail Operations through the integration of existing or new data sets, and it was a challenge shaped by Thales’ work in the Shift2Rail Consortium’s FINE-2 Project.
Scott Heath, Innovation Manager at Thales, said: “As Coordinator of the FINE-2 Project, it was great to see our project team directly engaging with SMEs. Not only is this a key objective of Europe Commission funded R&D, but it’s also a great way to find new ideas and collaborations that can help realise the improvements we all want to see in rail. It is my hope that this is the first of many such SME engagements within our transport business.”
Competition to be the winner of challenge was stiff with 9 SMEs making it through to the pitching stage. These organisations held specialisms ranging from the transport sector, to astrophysics and smartphone software development.
A panel of Thales experts assessed each pitch, and following an afternoon of deliberations selected their winner: Alchera Technologies.
“We are specialists in software tools and machine learning,” Anna Jordan, Co-founder and Operations Lead at Alchera explained. “We have worked on data-driven decision making for mobility operations in other sectors before, such as helping local authorities to understand pinch-points on their bus networks. By working with Thales in the Shift2Rail programme, we are hoping to expand our capabilities into the rail sector, benefiting from the deep-set industry expertise and customer pain-point knowledge they have. I am very excited by what we can achieve together.”
Going forward, the plan is for Thales and Alchera to jointly deliver a proof-of-concept demonstrator, based on their pitch. “Alchera suggested a really exciting use case that addressed a problem we hadn’t considered before,” Heath explained. “I look forward to showcasing our results in the autumn.”
If you’re an SME that’s interested in engaging with Thales’ UK transport business, you can reach out to Scott at the following email: scott.heath@uk.thalesgroup.com
