How challenges and trends give rise to innovations for the railway

Some ideas arise spontaneously by chance. However, we can also give our creativity and inspiration a helping hand by listening to other people's ideas, engaging in mutual exchange and brainstorming, and specifically analysing current challenges and technological trends.

You encounter a challenge in your business unit, but you're not sure how to implement its solution in practice. The first thing to do is set up a project team and flesh out the vision. By implementing creative methods with like-minded inventors and mentors in the Skydeck, you can turn a flash of inspiration into a tangible concept.

Now it is time to accelerate the idea and validate hypotheses in application tests. This includes drawing up a business case and building the first prototype. This step serves primarily to test the idea's chances of success and railway relevance in advance and formulate the idea into a viable concept. At this stage, many ideas are still incomplete, or even fail. The right advice and support can give project team members the skills they need. At Demo Day, our innovation teams finally get a chance to inspire others with their vision.

A project that has successfully completed the accelerator phase can become a "venture". Ventures are funded internal DB startups that develop innovative solutions for real-world applications. The innovation process turns an idea into a successful startup with which we put innovations into practice together. And this is how our successful ventures came into being.