Innovation is central to how we work across the whole business and ‘innovative’ is one of our core values that is reinforced and celebrated across the year.
Our annual Innovation Festival is now very established and highly anticipated nationally and globally. The novel format of the festival enables us to attract a diverse audience which is a critical part of design sprints.
Since our first Festival we have taken >250 ideas back into the business and put more than £1.5million back into the local economy, demonstrating our convening power to bring others into our regions. The festival output projects cover many aspects of the business, including the sector changing No Dig pipe fix product which we have used in >10 live trials with great promise.
The outcome of the most recent Innovation Festival in 2023 has yielded 42 project with an potential value of £170M over five years. Applying our four out of ten failure rate, this is an annual value at minimum of £12M. This is in addition to six Ofwat innovation bids potentially worth £12M. All these projects are open to the UK water sector, and we are partnering with many companies helping to push the boundaries on these tough challenges for the benefit of all UK customers.
As part of our Innovation Festival, we designed a mobile pumped water storage unit (MOWBI) that can be transported to single properties experiencing a loss of water which temporarily restores water to the property (at a sufficient pressure), until a more permanent resolution can be put in place. We are very proud that our teams have taken this innovation from the conceptual stage through to the point of delivery as we have fully rolled out the MOWBIs in Essex. They are particularly useful in events where we find a more complicated repair or there is a health and safety reason. We view these to eliminating supply interruptions for 12 hours or more because most supply interruptions > 12 hours occur occurred on single properties.