The new centre of excellence being established as part of the water sector’s innovation strategy – named Spring – launched its website last week. The site provides a taster of the services that will be on offer from December when Spring formally launches as a minimum viable product ahead of further refinement.
It will seek to accelerate innovation through two parallel routes:
• the Ideation and Collaboration incubator, to bolster and streamline how ideas are formed and how different stakeholders will be brought together; and
• the Innovation Adoption route, focussed on getting innovations into the hands of those who can use them.
This early work has been funded by a successful £250,000 bid to Ofwat’s first Innovation in Water competition, match funded by water companies through UKWIR.
The team behind the project said the next step for Spring will be establishing it as a subsidiary of UKWIR, so it can retain an independent brand and develop its own sustainable funding programme, while sharing resources and strategic links with the industry’s research organisation.
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