Mayor of London’ FreightLab seeks innovators to tackle congestion, safety and air quality

Transport for London (TfL) has published a civic innovation challenge to accelerate innovations that promise to tackle the negative externalities of essential freight and services in the city. Innovators will receive a £20,000 stipend upfront to refine their proposal in partnership with TfL (10 weeks), run a pilot (16 weeks) and submit a report.

Submission deadline: February 5, 2020 12:00pm GMT

Access the specifications here and make sure you use the Tender website to get all the latest and submit your proposal.

What is FreightLab?

FreightLab is an innovation challenge to inspire creative solutions to London’s urban challenges in freight, services and logistics.

• To help identify new approaches for achieving our policy outcomes as outlined in the Mayor’s Transport Strategy and Freight and Servicing Action Plan, particularly around the promotion of clean, safe and efficient freight and protecting land for industry.
• To understand the commercial viability of new products and services, in particular to investigate whether land can be used to mitigate adverse impacts of freight and servicing activity while still providing commercially viable returns.
• To harness the powerful advantages of emerging technologies, novel products, services and business models; and turn these into opportunities which are tailored towards the London’s problems. In short, we are hoping to help direct innovation towards solutions which deliver for the London.

How it works

London FreightLab is seeking to inspire innovative solutions from the market to some of London’s challenges related to freight and servicing — primarily focused on improving the efficiency of motor vehicle-based freight and servicing activity. Ultimately, TfL want to gather learnings which can help inform pan-London policy for freight and servicing, and to explore whether a new commercial model may exist for land within London.

Innovators will be provided with access to TfL data (as appropriate), expertise and assets (and Partners data, assets and expertise too subject to further agreement) to enable co-development and trials of the solutions.

Regarding TfL land specifically, TfL will where possible and subject to contract, planning and board approvals, make relevant sites available to successful Innovators for the length of the trials. Land may include car parks and railway arches. Partners and other land owners may also provide access to land, although this will be subject to further agreements with them.

Suppliers shall spend up to 10 weeks working with TfL (and subject to agreement Partners) to tailor their proposals to the specific needs of both TfL and Partner organisations, and ensure products are ready to be trialled and co-defining measures of success for the trial.

Suppliers shall then deliver a trial of their solution for a period of no less than 16 weeks, and no more than 26 weeks — although subject to discussions between TfL and the Innovators, trials may continue for a longer period of time. All trials must begin at the same time.

Suppliers shall create a summary report which outlines the impact their solution had during trials. The summary report will need to outline what impact the proposed solution had during real world trials on TfL’s key metrics.

This summary report shall be delivered within 4 weeks of the completion of the live trials stage. Learnings from the trials will be made public via the TfL website. Please note, no confidential information of the Partners or Innovators will be publicly released. TfL will also host a demo-day as part of this evaluation period where Innovators will be able to showcase their achievements and feedback on the programme.