Judges named for Ofwat’s £40m Water Breakthrough Challenge

The eight-member judging panel has been announced for the main event in Ofwat’s innovation fund which will award winning entries prizes of up to £10 million in September.

The panel will judge entries to the first round of the £40 million Water Breakthrough Challenge that was established as part of PR19 to encourage collaboration to find solutions to common problems in the sector.

Chosen from within the industry as well as academia, policy development and research, consumer representation and engineering, the judges are:

• Paul Connell – founder, Open Data Institute Leeds
• Tony Conway – visiting professor, University of Sheffield and director, British Water
• Sharon Darcy – director, Sustainability First
• Paul O’Callaghan – founder & CEO, BlueTech Research
• Niki Roach – president, Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management and director of AxiaOrigin
• Frank Rogalla – director of innovation and technology, Aqualia
• Anusha Shah – director, Arcadis
• Kalanithy Vairavamoorthy, executive director, International Water Association

Panel chair, Anusha Shah said: “Complex dilemmas such as how to respond to the climate and nature emergency and ensuring customer voices are heard mean that the water sector has decisions to make: the sector can make a positive decision to drive bold solutions by thinking outside the box, driving behavioural change and embracing cross-sector collaboration.”

Entries closed last month following the successful £2 million Innovation in Water Challenge that ran in the spring.

Ofwat established the £200 million fund as part of the current price review to encourage innovation while shouldering risk in getting projects off the ground. The regulator emphasised the need for innovation to meet the stretching targets the sector faces. Both the Innovation in Water and Water Breakthrough Challenges will run until 2025 with projects and their impacts extending beyond that.