Collaboration – the key to innovation

As AMP6 approaches, it’s becoming apparent that all water companies need to review traditional ways of working and introduce new-style capital delivery strategies with a strong focus on today’s all-important metric – customer outcomes, says Keith Wishart head of innovation, sustainability and collaboration at eight2O.

Within the water industry, there’s a drive to do things very differently in the next AMP period and the eight₂O alliance is a great example of this new way of working. It’s a partnership of eight organisations, each with significant expertise in their own field of work:

• Two joint ventures – Costain, Veolia, Atkins (CVA) and Skanska, MWH and Balfour Beatty (SMB)
• IBM as the technology and innovation partner
• MWH as the programme management function
• Thames Water (as alliance partner every bit as much as client).

Collaboration is at the heart of the alliance – and its one of our key workstreams in its own right. Well that’s nothing new, you might say. Surely, collaboration is essential to every partnership? Well yes, but the collaboration between the eight₂O partners is much deeper and more integrated than I’ve ever encountered before.

When you join a meeting at eight₂O, you have no idea who works for which home organisation… and nor should you. What you see are people from multiple disciplines working together and tapping into each other’s specialist skills, knowledge and experience to explore and develop intelligent solutions and new ways of approaching old and new problems alike. And I have to say that the scale, breadth and reach of the eight₂O alliance – not to mention the access to global resources – are mind-blowing.

But the oppurtunity for innovation is not just to extract the best ready-made solution from each partner. It’s about getting the best of those organisations working together, in order to achieve things that even IBM – big as it is – couldn’t aspire to on its own, because it lacks the specialist knowledge of, say, a Costain or a Veolia Water.

One of the most unusual and important features of eight₂O is that the client is also an equal partner. So rather than directing proceedings, Thames Water is as much a partner of the alliance as any of the other seven organisations. It’s a concept that’s starting to work extremely well: people from the eight home organisations now consider themselves to be part of eight₂O. And the more we work together, the higher the levels of collaboration and integration we’ll achieve.

And to be candid, this is actually a much, much harder form of collaboration, because you can’t just sit in the safe haven of your home organisation and do things the way you have always done them. You’ve got to get stuck in and start working with a completely new bunch of people from different organisations, and from different commercial and cultural backgrounds. And for that sort of joined-up thinking to succeed, there has to be openness, collaboration and trust among all partners.

I’m not saying we have all the answers; we recognise that the eight₂O alliance is still at the start of a very long journey. But what I do know is that we’ve learned a tremendous amount during our first 10 months together, and that by the time we enter AMP6 we’ll have lifted our performance to a completely new level.

Keith Wishart, will be speaking at a debate entitled ‘Delivering Innovation through Alliances and Partnerships AMP6’ at Sustainability Live on April 3. For more information and to book your free place, see www.sustainabilitylive.com