In-Conversation
with Daniel Clarke
We are thrilled to introduce our third “In-Conversation With” interview in the series! The initiative aims to celebrate transformational leaders across UK local authorities by sharing their expertise, success stories, and advice on implementing innovative procurement practices.
This week, we had the privilege of interviewing Daniel Clarke, Head of Innovation and Technology at Greater Cambridge Partnership, delving into topics on innovation, procurement, and how these strategies are applied in Cambridge.
What is a Greater Cambridge Partnership, what is your role in it, and what challenges is it trying to address?
The Greater Cambridge Partnership (GCP) is a collaboration between local councils, businesses, and academia in the Greater Cambridge area. The GCP aims to improve transport infrastructure, support economic growth, and enhance quality of life. I am part of the team which is delivering the City Deal for the area – set up to ensure that infrastructure needed to deliver the 33,500 houses set out in the current local plan, supporting 44,000 new jobs.
Congestion is one of the biggest issues facing us along with infrastructure constraints. Significant investment is being made to improve the transport system, such as building new cycle and busways as well as new travel hubs.
I am the Head of Innovation and technology and lead the Smart Cambridge Programme, exploring how data and emerging technology can make a difference to the wider programme. We pilot and trial new technologies and have taken innovation out of this stage and scaled across the area.
Can you tell us more about the Smart Cambridge Programme and how you developed and scaled it to address city challenges?
The focus of the Smart Programme has primarily been on deploying technologies that support the transport programme – helping people to get around Greater Cambridge. To do this we have built collaborative partnerships across the public and private sector.
We encourage companies to use Cambridge as a test-bed for new technologies that align with the problems we are trying to solve. A good example of this is VivaCity who trialled their first smart traffic monitoring sensors in Cambridge on our existing infrastructure. Having seen how the technology performed we have worked with them on several pieces of work. We then wanted to scale these across the city and to allow partners to easily buy sensors to add into the network and to share data. We did this through open-market procurement that would purchase the core network and developed a framework to allow the network to grow. The success is evident as we now have a network of 96 sensors. On the back of this network, we recently completed a trial of the VivaCity smart signals product.
The data from the network is integral to the wider GCP programme supporting business case development and the monitoring and evaluation of big schemes to understand the impact on local communities.
We also partner with companies on funding bids and are currently the lead partner in Connector – an autonomous bus pilot which will allow us to explore how this technology can support our ambitions to expand the public transport system. Funding bids often bring procurement challenges, particularly if the funding is allocated to the Local Authority. Generally to develop bids, we need to work with partners, often we need to procure these partners post-bid so are unable to name them in the bid document and any procurement once the grant has been secured comes at risk, as the original partner may not be successful.
We work collaboratively with academia to access cutting-edge research.
Working closely with the University of Cambridge we have built a data platform for the processing of real time data, and travel screens which have been deployed as a research project. We have also been involved in some early-stage digital twin work. At the beginning, this work tends to be unfunded or is funded through academic grants. The issue is when we want to scale the work up and invest GCP funds, procurement tends to be a barrier.
How have you used procurement to support Innovation?
We have used procurement to drive innovation. In the early days of the programme, we procured a start up to build a multi-modal, multi-operator app that had a number of innovative features. We specifically designed the procurement to support innovation in the market. Instead of specifying the exact functionality of the journey planner, we focussed on desired outcomes and made sure that the procurement was accessible for star- ups by amending our contractual terms and conditions lowering the insurance thresholds and adapting our approach to IP . This approach allowed suppliers the flexibility to propose innovative solutions that meet the end goals.
We are also currently working on a business case for Mobility as a Service and are looking to partner with another local authority who has already deployed this. Integral to these discussions are procurement colleagues who will help us to work through how we procure the solution to scale from one Local Authority area into ours.
How are you supporting Innovation in Cambridge?
We are keen to support innovation and launched our Innovation Prospectus last year, which is a call for collaboration to innovative businesses and academia to come and use Cambridge as a test bed. So, if you have an interesting innovation that can help us to solve some of the city challenges we face do please get in touch. The prospectus can be found here – Innovation Prospectus.
Finally, what have you been able to achieve to date through the Smart Cambridge Programme?
The pilots delivered by the GCP have demonstrated how Innovation has supported our ambitions to support travellers make more sustainable journeys and to keep the road network flowing.
The Vivacity Smart Signals pilot saw an improvement in traffic flows and the ability to prioritise for sustainable modes, the Starling pilot saw a 36% reduction in average pedestrian waiting times, the multi modal travel app had 2000 regular users and the network of Vivacity sensors has significantly improved our ability to develop business cases and evaluate the impact of major infrastructure schemes.
As pilots are scaled into business as usual deployments we anticipate that we will see significant benefits for local communities, supporting greater integration in the transport system, supporting more sustainable journeys and improving quality of life for residents.
Daniel Clarke
Head of Innovation and Technology, Greater Cambridge Partnership