A Sprint to the finish: Cracking the challenge of innovation adoption at the Northumbrian Innovation Festival

Launched in 2020, the Ofwat Innovation Fund has now awarded funding to 93 projects.

But for the benefits of this funding to be realised, it is vital for the sector to rapidly adopt solutions that have demonstrated their value, as well as learn from those that haven’t worked.

As more and more innovation fund projects continue their progress and achieve their planned outcomes, the focus on sharing learning and adopting successful solutions at scale becomes more pressing.

To help address this, the Ofwat Innovation Fund took part in the Northumbrian Water Innovation Festival, running a 4-day sprint between 8-11 July 2024. During the week participants explored the barriers to new innovations being adopted at scale in the water sector, and how Ofwat, water companies, and new and existing suppliers can work together to overcome them.

A Sprint to the finish: What we heard

Through a series of exercises and discussions, we gathered key insights, from participants, on the sector and some of the Ofwat funded projects used as case studies in the sprint.

Below is some of the feedback we received over the four days.

• The regulatory landscape can, at times, discourage innovation in areas where there is less of a spotlight from regulators. Conversely, we understood that innovations do not always match the timeframes required to create the impact and changes regulators want to see.
• The issue was most widely felt in the “handover stage” between pilot (innovation) and operational teams (Business As Usual) where it was felt that internal siloes and disconnections between teams are inhibiting the uptake of pilots carried out in the funded projects among water company front-line operational teams.
• There is a clear need for further guidance and frameworks required to ensure transfer of knowledge from projects within a water company, between water companies and across the water sector ecosystem.
• The sector also requires streamlined decision-making processes and frameworks to support projects in building commercial business cases for innovation adoption.
• The sector needs a clear strategy on innovation adoption – mapping and highlighting key stakeholders, their roles, responsibilities and accountability to break down barriers to adoption across the sector.

Next steps

The feedback from the Sprint will be extremely useful for the Fund and Ofwat in considering how to encourage adoption of winning projects.

Ofwat will use the feedback from the Sprint as it considers its final decisions on the future of the Ofwat Innovation Fund, including the proposals it consulted on doubling the size of the fund to at least £400 million for 2025-30 – and introducing new competitions. Ofwat plans to confirm its final decisions by the end of 2024.

Since the festival, Spring – the water sector’s innovation hub, itself an Ofwat Innovation Fund winning project – and Ofwat have published a set of joint principles on sharing knowledge and have established new guidance to support faster scaling-up and adoption of new solutions in the Sector. Find out more about Spring and its knowledge sharing events and resources on its website.

This Innovation Festival sprint is part of a suite of activities the Fund is taking part in to support the sector around knowledge sharing. Other activities include the following:

• We encourage all projects to share knowledge, information, and data to ensure (if successful) they can be scaled up and adopted more widely. It also reduces the need for multiple companies to trial the same solution.
• We are publishing a series of learning reports to spotlight the experiences, insights and learnings from funded projects working in particular areas, to support water sector stakeholders to adopt, build on and learn from the innovations funded in these areas to date. The first two reports focus on five projects working in Circularity in Water, and eight projects that are Supporting water-efficient communities.
• Sharing a newsletter of lessons learnt from funded projects with water company innovation teams
• Publishing on the website a quarterly update from projects to the wider sector
• Sharing news of projects through guest-written blogs or media opportunities. See the News page on the Fund website for more information. If you would like your project to be featured or to write a blog for us, please get in touch at [email protected]

We would like to thank Northumbrian Water for hosting our Sprint at their festival. If you are interested in attending or taking part in next year’s festival, you can find more details on the Innovation Festival website.