The team at Southern Water’s Bluewave innovation, research and development lab is inviting individuals, businesses and organisations with ideas for new processes, technologies or ways of working collaboratively to get in touch.
With a range of experience from both in and outside the water sector, the Bluewater team works on a wide range of projects and programmes, using clearly-defined processes and methodologies to help quickly define challenges, develop ideas and collaborate with teams and individuals.
The team recently sponsored and led a 5 day sprint to tackle leakage at Northumbrian Water’s Innovation Festival 2023 which resulted in ground-breaking innovations for reducing leakage, including a small robot that tracks leaks in the home via an app, a toilet leak alarm and a dashboard for alerting about leaks across a whole community.
The sprints are creative, time-focussed events, that follow a process of identifying problems, opening up the potential for a wide range of possible solutions, before focussing on creating and testing the best solutions to take forwards. The idea is to make rapid progress towards solving a specific challenge.
The team is now looking to take forward the ideas developed during the sprint, including submitting at least one idea as part of a bid to the Ofwat £200 million Innovation Fund.
Southern Water is asking interested individuals, businesses and organisations to get in touch. The Bluewater team is interested in hearing about ideas for collaboration in the following specific areas from the Water Innovation 2050 strategy:
- Delivering resilient infrastructure systems: Network management (both waste and clean) working on how we can move to more intelligent network approaches
- Protecting and enhancing natural systems: Environmental challenges – how we can move to more catchment led approaches
- Achieving net zero carbon: Energy efficiency – focusing on net positive impact on our energy sources
- Taking a whole life approach to responsible consumption and production: Asset resilience – harnessing ways which we can improve our treatment capacity, this also links into greener solutions whereby we can look to increase the volume we can serve through initiatives other than heavy intensive capital builds
When ideas are received they are reviewed as part of the lab innovation process – the team aims to get back in touch within four weeks (or less, depending on whether it is required as part of the Ofwat innovation fund).
Click here for more information about the Bluewater innovation lab
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