Methodology

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At Safetytech Accelerator, we help organisations turn complex safety and sustainability challenges into clear, actionable innovation opportunities. Our approach brings structure, evidence, and focus to technology adoption — ensuring teams invest in solutions that solve real problems and create measurable impact.

Each stage of our methodology builds clarity: understanding the challenge, defining outcomes, finding the right partners, shaping effective connections, and validating what truly works in practice. It’s a proven framework for reducing risk, accelerating innovation, and delivering results that matter.

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Prioritise

Focus on what truly matters.

We work closely with our customers to identify the real risks and challenges, across safety, social & environmental results, and performance. By getting to the root cause, we ensure effort and technology are directed where they can make a meaningful difference.

Output: Clear priorities for investment that delivers real impact.

Frame

Agree on outcomes.

We turn challenges into clear, measurable briefs. Together, we define success, align on decisions that need to be made, and set out what progress looks like in practice.

Output: A shared brief that enables action and accountability.

Identify

Find solutions that fit the challenge.

We identify, evaluate, and connect organizations with the most relevant technologies and partners across global innovation ecosystems, from early-stage startups to established tech companies.

We remain technology-neutral, sourcing and assessing innovations from across the tech landscape without preference, ensuring the best fit for the challenge at hand.

Output: A focused set of credible partners and solutions.

Connect

Build partnerships that work in practice.

We actively engage the people and organizations that make up the ecosystem, like founders, corporates, institutions, and partners, building strong relationships and communities, coordinating efforts, and bringing the right groups together to work effectively and achieve meaningful results.

Output: Partnerships designed to move forward with confidence.

Prove

Create evidence you can act on.

We offer flexible tests, including feasibility studies, proofs of concept, and pilots, to understand what works, what doesn’t, and why. Each initiative delivers clear insights, enabling informed decisions to scale, adapt, or stop.

Output: The confidence to take the next step, or not.

From Insight to Impact

Our case studies showcase how we partner with industry leaders, regulators, and innovators to solve shared challenges, de-risk adoption of new technology, and deliver measurable results. Each study highlights the challenge, the innovative solution, and the impact achieved.

Eco-System Acceleration

Cargo Fires and Loss Co-Innovation Initiative (CFLII)

The Risk

Cargo fires are often treated as isolated technical accidents. Our experience suggested something different: they are a system problem.

Risks are spread across many actors, accountability is fragmented, proven solutions are adopted slowly, and the industry tends to react after losses rather than prevent them.

We believed that if cargo fires were treated as a shared, systemic risk, then bringing shipowners, insurers, researchers, and technology providers into the same conversation, and drawing on solutions already working in other high-risk sectors, could meaningfully reduce incidents at sea.

This was not about inventing something new for its own sake. It was about moving faster with what already works, in a collaborative way.

Our Approach

We began with people, not technology. We brought together practitioners and decision-makers from across the maritime value chain to map the most critical points where failures occur. These discussions were practical and sometimes challenging: where do current systems fall short, and where are we relying on habit rather than evidence?

Three principles guided the initiative:

Transfer, don’t reinvent: prioritise technologies already proven in other high-risk industries.
Test before trust: support promising start-ups, but only through structured real-world testing.
Lower the risk to learn: generate evidence before partners commit money, operations, or reputation.

Lessons Learned

System risks require shared ownership, not isolated fixes.

Proven solutions move faster when evidence matters more than novelty.

Neutral testing environments build trust and speed real decisions.

Impact

CFLII is helping reduce cargo fire risk by enabling evidence-based adoption of new tools, while also building greater trust between shipowners, insurers, and innovators, groups that often have different incentives and timelines.

Equally important, the initiative shortened the path from idea to deployable, safety-critical solutions. We created a safe space to assess what works, what doesn’t, and what needs adapting before it can scale. The sector began shifting from reactive loss management to proactive, data-led prevention, a change in mindset as much as in technology.

We have explored new approaches to early fire detection technologies including multi gas sensors, radio wave based analytics, Electronic nose (e-nose) systems and fibre optic heat detection. We are evaluating technology through comparative trials, continued testing and solutions that strengthen existing systems and reduce onboard cargo fires and loss. Our impact focuses on safeguarding people onboard and protecting our seas.

Open Questions

How can regulators keep learning from the market beyond short-term pilots?

What governance is needed to keep digital regulation usable as technology changes?

How can regulators shape markets without taking over them?

Regulatory Sandbox work with HSE

Turning digital regulation into a market enabler

The Risk

As the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) began modernising how it regulates, the biggest question was not whether rules could be digitised, but whether they would actually work in practice.

HSE wanted to become a more enabling regulator, one that supports innovation while maintaining strong safety standards, but this depended on making choices that businesses and technology providers could genuinely use.

Digitising regulations and regulatory data was therefore a critical moment. If done well, it could unlock better safety tools, smarter compliance processes, and more innovation across industry. If done badly, it could lock in flawed assumptions, increase the burden on businesses, and damage trust at a time when digital regulation was still emerging.

Our Approach

HSE needed real-world evidence on how digital regulation would be used, how tech companies handle regulatory data, what makes information machine-usable, and how to engage the market without guesswork.

To achieve this, we created the Smarter Regulation Sandbox, a space to test digital regulation in practice. Through an open challenge, six technology companies were selected, covering four areas: AI language tools, computer vision systems, regulatory data platforms, and digital twin environments. Over ten weeks, these companies worked closely with HSE, industry experts, and mentors.

They tested live regulatory data, worked with stakeholders, and explored how rules could be integrated into real operational tools used by businesses.

Machine readability depends on clear structure and shared interpretation, not just digital format.

Regulators and markets often see risks differently, real innovation happens through collaboration.

Testing and experimentation reduce long-term risk more effectively than publishing finished rules in isolation.

Lessons Learned

Impact

The sandbox revealed insights HSE could not have gained alone. Working with real tools exposed gaps in data, inconsistencies in language, and areas where rules were open to different interpretations, problems that only become visible in practice. These findings helped shape how regulatory data is now structured and managed across government.

Collaboration also shifted HSE from assumption to evidence about how digital regulation can enable better compliance tools. For example, Navatech used structured HSE data to improve the accuracy of its AI insights from 88% to 94%, which it described as a major boost to its commercial success.

The market impact was clear. Companies refined their products, launched pilots, and won new contracts. Navatech secured three new industry deals, doubled its revenue, and gained its first UK client. Meanwhile, businesses benefited from earlier access to more practical regulatory tools, improving safety, efficiency, and decision-making.

Open Questions

How can regulators keep learning from the market beyond short-term pilots?

What governance is needed to keep digital regulation usable as technology changes?

How can regulators shape markets without taking over them?

Shaping the Future of Road Innovation

Unlocking low-carbon roads innovation at scale

The Risk

As pressure grows to cut carbon from UK highways, the main risk is not a lack of new ideas, it is the difficulty of adopting them. Innovative low-carbon road materials are being developed around the world, but very few were moving beyond small lab trials into real UK roads, and even fewer were being used at scale.

The roads sector is complex, highly cautious, and fragmented across many organisations. Without intervention, promising materials would likely continue to stall, keeping higher-carbon methods in place and slowing progress toward net-zero goals.

The working hypothesis was that a targeted programme of experimentation, combined with a clear analysis of barriers, could help unlock progress.

Our Approach

We adapted our sandbox model for the roads sector, combining market research, barrier analysis, and a practical acceleration and pilot programme, all delivered with public and private stakeholders.

We launched a global call for innovators and selected six high-potential companies working on rubber-modified roads, plastic and polymer surfaces, low-carbon cement and concrete alternatives, and novel asphalt technologies.

We created a UK-wide mentor network uniting local authority road managers, engineers, delivery partners, universities, and testing laboratories, and over a 10-week programme worked with each company to identify barriers to UK deployment, design realistic pilots, and build practical evidence and delivery plans.

The UK has strong foundations for roads innovation, but progress depends on sustained funding & better coordination.

Cultural barriers persist: cost and risk concerns slow adoption, making strong evidence against recognised standards essential.

Without central funding, most local authorities lack the capacity to invest in mid-stage innovations.

Lessons Learned

Impact

The sandbox delivered results both for individual innovators and for the wider UK roads system.

For innovators:

Start-ups built relationships with dozens of key players in the UK roads sector.
Multiple UK-first pilots were designed and launched with local authorities.
Several international companies entered the UK market for the first time and signed new commercial agreements.
Companies made major improvements to their products, from how they positioned “plastic roads” to fundamental changes in manufacturing, driven by real testing and mentor feedback.

For the system:

The programme created a credible, repeatable model for helping low-carbon road materials move from idea to deployment.
It produced a shared understanding of the UK roads ecosystem and its barriers to innovation, captured in a published market playbook.
It outlined a future vision for a more connected local roads innovation system, aimed at influencing national policy.

Open Questions

Should the UK create a centrally funded centre of excellence for road materials innovation?

What would a permanent national testbed need to look like to enable safe, scalable experimentation?

What other sectors could benefit from a similar program?