News – Events
November 4, 2024
This summer at World Water Week, Ofwat, the economic water regulator in England & Wales, took part in a live Talkshow to share how we’ve used the Innovation Fund to drive innovation and unlock cultural change and collaboration within the water sector. Because while innovation could solve some of the water sector’s biggest challenges, regulation can often be seen to inhibit the impetus and potential for change. The Ofwat Innovation Fund is seeking to address exactly that.
World Water Week is an annual conference organized by the Stockholm International Water Institute, and this year’s theme of ‘Bridging Borders’ centred around cooperation to solve water challenges that affect the world.
The Ofwat Innovation Fund’s 93 winning projects (and counting) represent over 240 different organisations collaborating to solve some of the biggest challenges facing the water sector in England & Wales, from academics to non-governmental organisations (NGOs), solution providers to non-water utilities.
There’s a big emphasis within the Fund for active projects to continuously share their learnings and insights to enable the wider sector to understand what works – and what doesn’t – through the lifecycle of the project, not just when the project is complete. Ofwat and Spring, the UK’s water innovation centre of excellence have recently published their six principles for knowledge sharing, to be used as a guide by water companies.
But learnings aren’t just limited to the funded projects themselves. In the four years since the Fund began, there have been continual iterations and improvements in how the Fund itself has been designed and delivered from Ofwat and the Fund’s delivery partners Challenge Works, Arup and Isle Utilities.
Over 20 minutes of conversation, the Talkshow’s moderator Kanika Thakar guided our three speakers through the history of the Fund, some of the successes and learnings so far, as well as how the Fund is dialing up its ambition for the next five year period (2025-2030).
Representing Ofwat, Jeannette Henderson, Principal of the Ofwat Innovation Fund, observed how the Fund has hugely influenced collaboration in the sector, with an average of 13.5 partners on each funded project, which is in turn shifting the culture of water companies. The Fund has seen the water sector think more strategically about big problems like bio-resources and Net Zero, leading them to pool resources to work more collaboratively; for example, Severn Trent’s Net Zero Hub project brings together 10 water companies in England & Wales, as well as four water companies outside (Irish Water, Melbourne Water, Northern Ireland Water, Scottish Water), showing how the scale of some of the problems being tackled require huge consensus and support by the sector.
Elettra Pellanda, Programme Manager at Challenge Works, highlighted how collaboration isn’t limited to the water companies and projects themselves, but is crucial to the smooth day-to-day running of the Fund, with each delivery partner bringing different expertise. Through the example of the Water Discovery Challenge, Elettra showcased how the sector united to co-create a competition which opened the Fund to innovators outside the water sector for the first time; something that wouldn’t previously have been possible without the Fund’s role in shaping the innovation culture in the sector.
And finally, Bart Schoonbaert from Arup reflected how challenges faced by the water sector in England and Wales look remarkably similar to water challenges across the world, meaning that there’s a huge amount for everyone to learn from each other. Exploring nature based solutions continues to be an area of interest for many projects within the Fund (Mainstreaming nature based solutions, CaSTCo, Developing a market-based approach to deliver SuDS through street works to name a few) – and similarly a huge portion of the agenda at World Water Week was dominated by organisations sharing learning about nature based solutions projects across the world.
Wrapping up the discussion, the speakers looked to the future and how the Fund might continue to shape the water sector going forwards. Ofwat have consulted on the future of the Fund and are proposing making £400 million available for further innovation over the next five years, with a decision due at the end of 2024. Additional investment into water efficiency, nature-based solutions, more collaborative working between regulators and even greater emphasis on sharing learnings were all identified as crucial to continued collaboration in the sector and success for the Fund.
Also at World Water Week, the Fund launched its second learning report on ‘Supporting water-efficient communities’, featuring eight funded projects that are working to support and empower customers to become more water-efficient in different ways. This follows on the heels of the first report on five projects working in Circularity in water, published earlier in the summer.
If you’re interested in learning more from the conversation, watch the Talkshow in full below, and download the transcript here.
The Ofwat Innovation Fund also attended IWA World Water Congress & Exhibition in Toronto, Canada, this summer. See this blog from Rhys Herriott, Senior Programme Manager at Challenge Works, and part of the Ofwat Innovation Fund delivery team, for his reflections on the urgent need for innovation in water.
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