Northumbrian wraps up 2025 Innovation Festival and bids farewell to creator

Northumbrian Water ran and wrapped up its ninth Innovation Festival last week, featuring 53 sprints, dashes and hacks to crack key challenges for customers, the environment and infrastructure – amid music, comedy and inspirational talks.

Highlights are available on LinkedIn. 

The team also bid a sad farewell to Nigel Watson, Northumbrian’s chief information officer, who masterminded the festival concept and has nurtured it over the past nine years to become a major event in the water sector calendar. He is retiring at the end of the month.

Also last week, Northumbrian announced the open-source release of a suite of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) models under its River Deep Mountain AI project, which seeks to build tools to tackle waterbody pollution and improve river health. The cross-sector work previously secured £5m of funding from the Ofwat Innovation Fund. The models aim to support river flow predictions, pollution source tracking and pollution hotspot mapping. The release on the open-source platform GitHub is the project’s first major milestone, following completion of the development and initial testing phases.