Infographics: Innovation maturity in funded projects

In the interest of transparency, we publish open data on all awards made in the Fund. Our latest open data set includes award data for Water Breakthrough Challenge 4 and can be found on Ofwat’s website. Our hope is this open data can inform and prompt discussion on the future of the Fund, and help us improve the Fund’s long-term impact for customers, society and the environment.

In a previous blog, ‘Partnerships across the water cycle: an analysis of awards in the Ofwat Innovation Fund’, we examined how our awards have been allocated across the different competitions up to Breakthrough 3 (Spring 2023).

In this post we, share several infographics looking at:

• how the estimated maturity of innovation projects varies across each of the competitions; and
• water company partnerships within the funded projects.

Notes:

• This analysis uses additional final submission data from entrants to provide a static baseline data source.
• As part of the entry process, entrants were asked to provide a high-level expectation of their project’s Innovation Maturity Level (IML) both at the start and the end of their planned phases of work. IML is intended to give a high-level indication of the technological, commercial and operational readiness of the proposed innovation, over five levels:
  • 1 – Initial Research – Understanding the problem and exploring possible solutions.
  • 2 – Concept & feasibility – Developing or testing a concept, designing the solution, and testing feasibility of solutions.
  • 3 – Development & verification – Developing the preferred solution, verifying the design through demonstration in a real-world (or near real world) environment
  • 4 – Validation & optimisation – Scaling the solution for use (‘rollout’) or commercialisation
  • 5 – Deployment & post-launch – Implementing or rolling out the solution and assessing its impact.