Up to ten members from RAILWAY INNOVATION HUB have request to participate in the new program of innovative buyout run by the Industrial Technology of development Centre (acronym in Spanish CDTi) entity belonging to the Science and Innovation Ministry, under the name “Innovative Solutions Oriented to Public Demand” (Spanish acronym SIOD).

These solutions have been registered after the presentation made for the first time to the railway sector by CDTi in the course of the event organized by The Railway Innovation Hub in Málaga (May, the 23rd) under the title “New Resources and Financing for the Innovation”.

Through The Railway Innovation Hub, 6 SIOD applications have been remitted to CDTI, summing all these six applications an approximate amount of 15 million of euros.

Four out of these six applications have been proposed individually by associates to the cluster, meanwhile the other two have been formulated through the collaboration of up to seven different associates to the Spanish cluster in railway innovation. All these applications have ben studied and approved by ADIF, the public petitioner have given green-light for the sending to CDTI, who will have to choose among all the applications received, which ones will be finally funded.

The 6 applications which have been directly surged from the RIH´s event consist in projects for the construction of innovative prototypes from TRL 4 – TRL 6 trying to reach a TRL close enough to the market.

It may be good to remember that in the course of the RIH´s event, the responsible for the innovative public buyout office, Sergio Capitán exposed the requirements needed to benefit from this buyout financed from FEDER´s Funds, so non-Spanish enterprises could also be welcomed.

Capitán pointed that CDTI would acquire R&D services that could become in brand-new products or services, to run tests but also could satisfy public needs. In this sense, he qualified that the prototype developed will be yielded to the public administration who could proportionate the needed environment to validate the technology proposed.

Among all the requirements, Capitán pointed that the technology proposed need to count with the maturity level enough to be validated in a real environment by the administration and he insisted on the fact that the administrations would have to be local or autonomic from Castilla-La Mancha, Andalucía, Canarías, Castilla- León, Extremadura, Comunidad Valenciana and Galicia. He also pointed that all the protoypes would have to be worth more than 2 million euros.

These 6 applications have been valued by Railway Innovation Hub, in a positive way, whose heads have pointed “the importance and the utility from the events developed about the railway value chain”