Category Archives: iBUILD

CESER activities that relate to the iBUILD programme

Lord Deighton launches the new iBUILD #infrastructure research centre

Posted on by
Reply
Visit www.ibuild.ac.uk for more information.
 
Understanding how our key infrastructures interconnect – from a technical, economic and social perspective – will improve the way we finance and deliver them across the UK.

Experts at Newcastle University will lead a £3.5 million Centre set up to investigate how technical and market interactions between our energy, water, transport, waste and digital technology systems can be exploited to get better economic, social and environmental value from our infrastructure.

Brian Collins (Director of ICIF, UCL), Lord Deighton, Richard Dawson (Director of iBUILD, Newcastle), Martin Donnelly (Permanent Secretary for BIS), Adrian Alsop (Director of Research at ESRC), Dave Delpy (Chief executive of EPSRC)

Working with Leeds and Birmingham universities and 27 industrial partners, the new i- BUILD (Infrastructure Business models, valuation and Innovation for Local Delivery) Centre is part of the National Infrastructure Plan, published by the Government in 2011.Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) the Newcastle University-led project is one of two national centres being announced today in London by Lord Deighton, Commercial Secretary to the Treasury.  The second will be led by UCL.The Centres will create an interdisciplinary environment in which social scientists, engineers, industrialists, policy makers and other stakeholders can research and collaborate. They will consider how to deliver infrastructure, and the services it provides, to stimulate jobs and economic growth but also deliver wider environmental and social value.Richard Dawson, Director of i- BUILD and Professor of Earth System Engineering at Newcastle University, explains: “A growing population, modern economy and proliferation of new technologies have placed increased and new demands on infrastructure services and made infrastructure networks increasingly inter-connected.“Meanwhile, investment has not kept up with the pace of change leaving many components at the end of their life.  Furthermore, pressures associated with global environmental change require infrastructure to be less polluting and more resilient to extreme events such as flooding.

“These challenges place further pressure on the UK’s existing business models for infrastructure delivery that are in many cases already providing poor value.”

Professor Dawson said the key aim of the new Centre was to develop new business models that are able to reduce costs but also provide better value for people and the environment throughout the design, construction, operation, maintenance, decommissioning or conversion of the infrastructure systems.

“While national scale infrastructure planning remains important, it is at the scale of neighbourhoods, towns and cities – the focus of i-BUILD – that infrastructure is most dense and interactions between infrastructures, economies and society are most profound.

“We aim to harness the power of the Localism Act, City Deals and Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) and the innovation of communities to stimulate local economic growth through infrastructure delivery.

“After all, our national infrastructure and economy are only as good as the sum of their parts and this project offers us a real opportunity to innovate the way we deliver infrastructure and consequently stimulate economic growth.”

In Newcastle, i-BUILD will have a focus around Science Central, the country’s largest inner-city regeneration project that is set to become an exemplar of Sustainability research for the UK.  The site will be used as a pilot for the i-BUILD project to demonstrate how infrastructure can be planned and financed in a smarter way to better support local communities and to stimulate growth.

Similar case studies will be developed in Leeds, Birmingham and elsewhere.

i-BUILD: Infrastructure BUsiness models, valuation and Innovation for Local Delivery

Posted on by
Reply

EPSRC and ESRC have recently announced the funding of i-BUILD, a £3.5M research centre, led by Professor Richard Dawson at Newcastle University, to develop new approaches to infrastructure business models with the ultimate aim of replacing current public-private business models that in many cases provide poor value.

While national scale infrastructure plans, projects and procedures set the wider agenda, it is at the scale of neighbourhoods, towns and cities that infrastructure is most dense and interdependencies between infrastructures, economies and society are most profound – and hence the focus of our activity will be at these local and urban scales.  Balancing growth across regions and scales is crucial to the success of the national economy. The Government’s response (March 2013) to Lord Heseltine’s review of local economic growth emphasised the devolution of funding for local major infrastructure schemes that is occurring from 2015, the importance of the development of an integrated approach to local infrastructure investment and also noted the requirement for alternative funding models. This localism agenda is encouraging local agents to develop new infrastructure related business but this is limited by the lack of robust new business models with which to do so at the local and urban scale.

To develop a new generation of business models the i-BUILD research programme is structured around three main research streams:

(i)   Reducing the costs of infrastructure delivery by understanding interdependencies between systems and alternative finance models;

(ii)  Improving the way we value the wider benefits of our infrastructure by identifying and exploiting the social, environmental and economic opportunities; and,

(iii) Reconciling local scale priorities with regional and national strategic needs – because no locality is disconnected from its surroundings.

New approaches developed through these research streams will be tested and demonstrated on integrative case studies in partnership with an extensive stakeholder group from academic, private, public and voluntary sector organisations. 

An official launch event will take place on the 7th June.  Details to follow.

About the i-BUILD team:
The i-BUILD Centre brings together a highly integrated and multi-disciplinary team embracing many of the UK’s leading researchers in infrastructure engineering, business modelling, economic analysis and social science, alongside an extensive stakeholder group.  The Centre will have its headquarters at Newcastle University (Director: Professor Richard Dawson, CESER; Deputy director: Professor Andy Pike, CURDS) in collaboration with leading academics from the University of Birmingham (Deputy directors: Professor Chris Rogers; Professor John Bryson) and the University of Leeds (Deputy directors: Professor Phil Purnell; Professor Andy Gouldson). 

About the Newcastle team:
i-BUILD draws together expertise in civil engineering, urban economy, business models and societal engagement from four schools at Newcastle University: the School of Civil Engineering & Geosciences, the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University Business School and the School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development. 

The full i-BUILD team can be found here:
http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/K012398/1