Simon Dale-Lace, Technical Director at WSP in the UK, one of the world's leading professional services firms, takes a look at innovation in the water sector – and discusses why it’s really more about evolution than revolution.

Simon Dale-Lace: There are many new and emerging challenges facing us in the water sector. We need a mindset shift to develop and embrace the full potential of innovation if we are to tackle these whilst ensuring that water remains affordable.

When we think of innovation we often focus on the disruptive end. It’s a fun pastime when stuck in traffic to daydream about how much better my life would be with autonomous vehicles… After all, I could be having a snooze on the backseat!

The trouble with focussing on disruptive innovation is that they usually to come with high risk. We often hear the story where a team has started out full of energy and enthusiasm – the pilot looked great, but actual delivery was slow, costly and the promised benefits didn’t fully materialise – often only persisting due to the sunk cost fallacy.

Embracing evolution over revolution

The journey for most innovation is far more about evolution than revolution. It’s about the (adaptive) cruise control, automatic breaking, lane control, hazard identification – each of which has incrementally reduced accidents and improved comfort. We often hear that some of these great ideas were not initially progressed because they were not ‘innovative enough’.

Part of the issue is what we think innovation actually is - there is no widely agreed definition, but it tends to involve ‘radical new stuff’. The definition I use is the creation of sustained new value which exceeds the costs. It’s sustained because otherwise, it is just a gimmick. It’s value rather than profit because the benefits are often non-monetary. And the value must exceed the costs, or it would be an invention. I don’t consider there to be a minimum threshold of value created to be defined as innovation, or there to requirement for it to be a shiny physical thing, it can also be an approach or process.

The power of incremental change

Whilst it might seem trivial to discuss what innovation is, it’s very important. Without this definition, innovation teams typically focus on high-risk high-reward projects and wider parts of the organisation think that unless they come up with paradigm shifting ideas, then they’re not innovative enough and not important.

Incremental ideas have a habit of reliably delivering significant value at lower risk, especially when considered cumulatively. This is particularly due to these teams understanding the problem they are trying to solve, and their readiness to embed and adopt the innovations (one of the often-quoted challenges with innovation). If we’re clear on what innovation is, ask the right questions and listen, we can find valuable incremental innovations everywhere.

We definitely need disruptive innovations. But we also need a mindset shift towards continuous improvement, and we need to make it everyone’s role. We need a portfolio of innovations that maximises the outcomes and balances risk, not just a focus on the flagship ones.

And finally, we need to work together. This sounds obvious, but there are barriers within teams, organisations and across supply chains. The success of any innovation often hinges on how well we understand the problem and opportunity whilst aligning motivations and risks. And after all, our success at innovating as a sector relies upon us sharing our successes and failures.