Bees, Buses, and Business: The Power of Collective R&D

Manchester's iconic bee emblem symbolises more than just its industrial past; did you know the simple Honeybee can offer a masterclass in teamwork and research? #qualitybus 2024

Nicola reflects on her day as a member on the panel at the Bus Knowledge Sharing and Incident Network.

The Bus Knowledge Sharing and Incident Network Hosted by Chartered Institution of Highways & Transportation (CIHT) and the Department for Transport (DfT), United Kingdom offers an opportunity for the sector to collaborate in a way that mimics nature’s most efficient R&D department. By providing a way for stakeholders to pool knowledge, insights and data, it's possible to create a safer, more resilient system for everyone.

I recently had the pleasure of co-facilitating a workshop with fellow members of the Bus Knowledge Sharing and Incident Network’s expert panel at the Quality Bus Conference in Manchester. This gave me free range to combine a personal fascination with bees with my belief in the value of insight led, collective approaches to research and innovation.

 But what’s this got to do buses?

🐝 Let’s start with the bees. Honeybees have a strategy for survival that perfectly blends exploitation of known resources with exploration of new ones. The exploitation element is all about efficiency. Bees returning to the hive perform a waggle dance, a figure-of-8 dance used to direct fellow foragers to existing food sources and most bees follow this lead. The cycle continues until the food source becomes depleted or reduces in quality, at which point foragers cease dancing and recruitment stops.

However, a small number of bees are programmed to ignore the dance. These rogue bees (let’s think of them as the colony’s R&D department) venture out into unknown territories in search of new food sources and... most of the time they fail. But, every once in a while (let's say 1% of the time) these maverick bees stumble across an entirely new, abundant food source, which they then communicate to the efficiency bees and suddenly everyone’s heading in a new direction.

This elegant balance: some bees exploiting known sources, others exploring the unknown is essential to the colony’s long-term survival.

In many ways this mirrors what businesses must do to stay competitive and overcome known challenges. Unfortunately, most businesses follow the waggle dance, exploiting what they already know, rather than investing in the unknown. It’s understandable - no one likes uncertainty, and R&D can feel like a very expensive lottery ticket. But here’s the catch, while limiting yourself to safe & efficient can pay off in the short term, over time, a lack of investment in R&D leads to stagnation and diminishing ability to address known challenges.

The bus sector, like many other sectors, faces challenges that no organisation can solve alone. When a collective of stakeholders, businesses and policymakers pool resources with others -whether it’s time, data, or expertise - it’s possible to derive deeper insight into the causes of safety challenges too risky or costly for one company or authority to pursue independently.

So, what’s the lesson?

That the power of collective research and innovation is greater than the sum of its parts. By acting more like a colony and less like a collection of individual entities, the bus sector can strike a balance between following what works and venturing into the unknown. The "exploit- explore" trade-off balancing short-term efficiency with shared investment in long-term research provides a way to not only mitigate risk but to ensure the entire sector evolves and remains resilient.

Curious to learn more? Email the Bus KSI Network; Email bcoe@ciht.org.uk to join the network and mailing list.