The Culture Code: How Innovative Businesses Stay Innovative

As the Rail Innovation Group marks its 10-year anniversary, we're tackling a question that keeps surfacing across our membership: how do innovative businesses stay innovative as they grow?

Join us for an honest look at what changes, and what stands out, as companies scale.

Drawing on a decade of working with founder-led ventures evolving into established businesses, the event examines how organisations preserve the agility, creativity and customer focus that made them successful in the first place.

Why this conversation matters now

The rail sector is under pressure to improve productivity, invest-ability, decarbonisation, digital transformation, and passenger expectations. Innovation is a big part of the answer. Our recent member survey shows that getting ideas isn't the problem. Moving from concept to trial to adoption to scale is where things slow down.

We're seeing what many members describe as a scaling gap, sometimes called the "valley of death", where good ideas stall not because they don't work, but because the system around them makes it hard to embed and grow them. Underneath sits something more fundamental: culture. Innovation doesn't scale on technology alone. It scales on how organisations behave, decide, collaborate and lead.

Two perspectives, one conversation

This event brings together two important lenses on innovation in rail:

One Big Circle will reflect on a journey many in our community will recognise - growing from start-up roots into a trusted digital partner in rail. The conversation will explore what happens when innovation meets operations: how to get new ideas out of development and into real service, how to shorten the gap between procurement and deployment, and how to embed digital capability into rolling stock and infrastructure in ways that actually change outcomes on the ground. How do you make innovation land, not just launch?

Centre for Teams will focus on something that often gets less airtime but makes or breaks innovation at scale: the human side. As organisations grow, it's not just systems and processes that need to evolve. It's teams, leadership, communication, trust, and how decisions get made. Innovation depends on whether people still feel able to challenge, test, experiment and speak up, even as structures become more formal and delivery pressure increases.

What we'll explore

• What changes, and what breaks, as companies scale
• How to keep innovation moving once structures get bigger
• Where organisations lose speed, and how they get it back
• What "good" looks like when innovation becomes business-as-usual

Speakers

• Emily Kent, Co-Founder and Director, One Big Circle
• Philip Pozzo di Borgo-Oliver, Partner, Centre for Teams
• More to be announced

With thanks to Jacobs

Our grateful thanks to Jacobs for hosting us at the Cottons Centre, and for contributing to the discussions.

About the 10-year anniversary programme

This event sits within a series of activities running across the year, all focused on what it really takes to make innovation work, and all rooted in the experience of our members. The next 10 years of rail innovation won't be defined by ideas alone. They'll be defined by the cultures that can actually deliver them.

If this sounds like the kind of community you should be part of, the Rail Innovation Group is open to new members who are building, testing and scaling innovation in rail and adjacent sectors.

Get in touch via railinnovationgroup.com.

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