Briefing: Speeding up innovation by better ‘first use’ reporting

This briefing addresses an urgent issue for engineering innovators, institutions and journals: how can the spread of infrastructure innovation for sustainability be speeded up? It discusses the challenges and the reasons why innovation can be hard and slow, and focuses on a key innovation sequence: doing the ‘first use’ project, and early reporting of it, which ‘enables’ the first copying of the idea – the ‘first follower project’. This starts to validate the new idea for the sector. The briefing finishes with some suggested questions to be answered by a good report paper on a ‘first use’ case study; and calls for more such papers to be submitted.