Northumbrian takes Innovation Festival global

Innovation Festival is set to return in July 2020 with teams working 24-hours a day across three continents to spark and progress more ideas over the five-day event.

Hosted by Northumbrian Water, the event involves sprints, hackathons, challenges and speeches attended by people who work in, around or far removed from the water sector.

Nigel Watson, festival founder and director of information services at Northumbrian, told Utility Week three or four ideas out of every ten from previous events have delivered value for the company.

To pump even more ideas from the event, the UK team will hand over to a group at Isle Utilities in the US who will work on the project ideas then hand over to a team in Australia. Using a work sharing platform, Watson said “we’ll see if between us we can work around the clock.”

One or two of the hacks – that have no local niches – will be run in this way. “We have to find the commonality of challenge and it will be fun to follow the idea,” he said.

At this year’s Festival more than 7,000 ideas were generated, whittled down to 56 strong project ideas and of these ten became projects of real interest and progressed beyond the event.

Funding and cash prizes were awarded to nine of the hacks and four ideas received seed funding to progress the ideas further with sponsor companies involved.

“We set out to change the perception that the industry isn’t very innovative, and we’ve made some progress on that. The downside is questioning whether we focus too much time on that and not enough on the day to day job. What we spend on innovation and the amount of effort we spend on innovation pails in comparison to what we spend on business as usual,” Watson said.

“I calculated that based on what we’ve delivered into our business, we have a return of about £8 for every pound we spend.”

A project called Dragonfly was conceived to monitor the quality of water in rivers. Northumbrian is working with CGI and Three to progress the plan, which Watson said has two elements: “Can we create water sensors to put into rivers, and what kind of parameters can you monitor? A challenge is powering it with solar or the power of the river, but the bigger challenge is turning it into a 5G mesh network. That network is relatively new so that aspect will take three or four years to come to a head.”

He said ideas based around using pre-existing data progress the fastest. “It can be two or three years before testing all the limits of anything because of seasonality, geographic variations and anomalies. It can take a few years of data analysis to really test all the limits of a data hypothesis with refinement over that period, but you can see some value before that.”

As well as the Dragonfly project, others that have advanced include Mobileye street mapping, which is in progress with mobile cameras gathering data to map key assets.

A project from the first event in 2017 to map underground utility assets has been developed with Ordnance Survey to a point it is now being used in the Northumbrian region and simultaneously piloted in London.