Organisations Who Attended:
▪ Agbar Serco ▪ Amane Water ▪ AMT-SYBEX ▪ Anglian Water ▪Atkins ▪ Balfour Beatty Utility Solutions ▪ Black & Veatch ▪ Bournemouth & West Hampshire Water ▪ Bristol Water ▪ British Water ▪ CIWEM ▪ Clancy Docwra ▪ Defra ▪ Deloitte ▪ Design Council ▪ DLA Piper ▪ EMC Consulting ▪ Engage Consulting ▪ Enterprise ▪ GL Group ▪ Home Delivery Network ▪ IBM ▪ J Murphy & Sons Ltd ▪ Mahindra Satyam ▪ May Gurney ▪ Morrison Utility Services ▪ Mott Macdonald ▪ MWH ▪ Northumbrian Water ▪ Nigel Hawkins Associates ▪ Ofcom ▪ Office of Rail Regulation ▪ Ofgem ▪ Ofwat ▪ Royal Haskoning ▪ RPS Group Plc ▪ SBWWI ▪ Scottish Water ▪ SEAMS Ltd ▪ Sensus ▪ Severn Trent ▪ Skanska ▪ Southern Water ▪ South East Water ▪ South Staffordshire Water ▪ South West Water ▪ Sutton and East Surrey Water ▪ Technology Strategy Board ▪ Thames Water ▪ Turner Townsend ▪ Tynemarch ▪ UK Water Industry Research ▪ United Utilities ▪ Veolia Water ▪ Vertex ▪ Vision Consulting ▪ Warwick Business School ▪ Water Industry Commission for Scotland ▪ Water Industry Forum ▪ Wessex Water Services ▪ WRC Plc ▪ Yorkshire Water ▪
Innovation Hub 2010
The launch of the Water UK Innovation Hub was a huge success, thanks to Government contributions and valuable comments from other sectors’ regulators about how they encourage innovation.
Held in London at the Congress Centre, the Innovation Hub saw over 90 delegates attend, representing water companies, regulators and the supply chain.
The Innovation Hub focused on a number of areas: working in collaboration to meet future challenges; enabling and facilitating innovation through regulation; learning from other sectors; working with the supply chain, and innovation and managing change - the customer perspective.
To view the presentations from the event, please login and click here to access the online delegate pack
After the morning presentations and discussions, the audience were asked to contribute to an Innovation Hub ‘Thought Wall’ on facilitating innovation; they were asked - what one thing would you say to each group (supply chain, regulators, industry) to help facilitate innovation?
The rich feedback from the Thought Wall will be compiled and fed into Water UK’s work and it has been requested by Ofwat.
Tony Wray, Chief Executive of Severn Trent chaired the Innovation Hub. After hearing the insightful comments from the thought wall, his closing remarks and reflections at the end of the day summed up the emerging agenda for Water UK:
• Today we have heard many examples that good innovation is good business and can tie together great operational execution, customer service, environmental performance and financial performance. Nevertheless the general feeling is that innovation is a very challenging thing to sustain and renew.
• Are we innovating? Yes, through technology, markets and customer service.
• Are we doing it well enough? It’s encouraging what we have heard today, but there is so much that we need to do better.
• Consistency of technology, but also the process and very specifically culture and behaviour.
• Perception is reality – Martin Cave used the word ‘deficiencies’ and the regulatory panel members ended up at the same theme.
• Sources for being better – focus, spur innovation (liberalisation, contesting through competition) – regulatory evolution to sustain reward for successful innovation, i.e. aligning incentivisation and reward for innovation e.g. different cost of capital and payback periods.
• The industry needs to set ambitious targets.
• Customers need to be part of the innovation process.
• Insights to be found in other industries and experiences from other markets and disciplines.
