‘Machinery, not magic’:
How NWG’s Innovation Festival is reshaping the water industry
‘Machinery,
not magic’:
How NWG’s Innovation Festival is reshaping the water industry
Nigel Watson, Chief Information Officer at Northumbrian Water Group (NWG), highlights the creation and development of the company’s industry-redefining Innovation Festival.
Northumbrian Water Group (NWG), serves 4.5 million people across the North East of England, Essex and Suffolk, providing water and wastewater services.
orking with its stakeholders and customers, NWG has long-term plans in place to ensure it can deliver unrivalled customer experience today and in the years ahead.
Within these long-term plans, the company has three key change levers in its strategy – transformation, continuous improvement and innovation.
Joining us to discuss the third of these is Nigel Watson, Chief Information Officer at NWG. In particular, Nigel elaborates on the creation of the company’s Innovation Festival – an annual five-day event solving some of the water industry’s key challenges. To begin, Nigel celebrates the company’s risk-taking culture that has led to such significant innovations.
“Alongside transformation and continuous improvement, innovation
is one of three key levers that we need to pull in order to improve our business,” says Nigel. “What makes innovation different from the other two change levers is the level of risk involved.
“If we’re the first water company in the UK to do something then we categorise that endeavour as an innovation. This might mean we’re bringing something from the oil and gas industries or from somewhere globally to the UK market for the first time.
“Our expected success rate on deploying a new innovation is four out of 10, whereas we’d expect 90% of our transformation initiatives to succeed. That’s what makes innovation so critical for us – we accept the risk that some concepts might fail, because
no one will have gone down that path before. There’s always going to be bumps in the road and we might find that something isn’t going to be viable, but sometimes a new development can revolutionise the industry.”
NWG is looking for new ways to overhaul the water industry by developing a methodology for innovation, inspired by some of the world’s leading tech companies.
“Nine years ago, my boss said to me ‘I’m looking for machinery, not magic,’” says Nigel. “What she meant by that was that the brilliant ‘tada’ moments of innovation are all a part of the overall process. She told me that she wanted us to adopt a repeatable method for developing new innovations.
“I did my research, and read a book called Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
by Jake Knapp, which codified what Google and other leading companies were doing in terms of their approach to innovation.
“We looked at the concept and felt that a five-day approach could be very useful. With this methodology, on day one you look at the problem you want to solve through the eyes of the people who are experiencing the problem. Then on day two, you go into solutions mode, which you approach in a very divergent way – no idea is a bad one. We adopted the principles of improvisation where you’re saying ‘Yes, and?’ rather than dismissing anything. All of a sudden, you could reach a point where there’s something
very exciting born out of an idea you might have originally looked over.
“Day three is all about being convergent. We take that long list of ideas and bring it down to one or two winners. On day four, you’re lifting the idea off the page and bringing it to life, which could be anything from a PowerPoint to a prototype. Finally, on the fifth day, we test the product and decide if we’re going to go ahead and take it to the next stage. This is something we’ve been doing once a month for the past four years now, and we’ve found it to be a very effective process. We’re definitely realising ideas that we never would have had in the past.”
“I wanted to create an event where you feel enriched, with innovation at the centre”
Nigel Watson, Chief Information Officer at NWG
One such idea was coordinating a data hack to brainstorm solutions for some of the company’s key challenges.
“A friend of mine suggested that we try a data hack, which wasn’t something I’d heard of before,” says Nigel.
“Essentially, we put some data based around a problem we were facing into
a cloud environment and invited people to play with that data over the course of a weekend. Around 120 people took part, and it was hugely successful.
“After this, I had a conversation with my boss, and we agreed that things were going really well – but she wanted me to think bigger. She told me ‘I want you
to change the perception of the region.’ That’s when I had the idea for the Innovation Festival.”
Now in its eighth year, NWG’s Innovation Festival takes a selection of business challenges and issues currently facing the water industry and beyond. Bringing together people from a range of companies worldwide, the festival is designed to facilitate collaboration and produce solutions to these problems in five days or less.
“I wanted to create an event where you feel enriched, with innovation at the centre,” explains Nigel. “So in 2017 we held our first Innovation Festival, and I was absolutely terrified when I arrived and realised it was so much bigger than I expected it to be. There were 1,000 attendees from 140 organisations, far more than I originally anticipated.
“There was so much activity going on, and an infectious energy where people were connecting with one another – talking in the lunch queue, going between their tents, playing volleyball together. We realised that running things like this together creates something that you’d never get if you were embarking on innovation in isolation.”
Nigel credits the festival’s environment for nurturing inspiration among participants when coming up with new ideas or innovations.
“A huge part of the festival is creating a state of flow for the participants,” says Nigel. “We have uplifting live music played on site in the mornings, and we
often have a celebrity speaker. This year, we had athletes Steve Cram and Ellie Simmonds, because it was an Olympic year, as well as Dr Willard Wigan, who is the world’s greatest micro sculptor, and the RAF’s first female jet pilot, Mandy Hickson.
“Having such a range of different celebrities on our site has been great because we get such a range of different inputs and perspectives. We’ll have the interview with them, but then they’ll wander around the tents, meeting people and answering questions, which is what the festival is all about.
“We also have relaxation zones. Not everyone likes to be in a crowd, so we wanted to create places where people can sit in a giant deck chair for a little while and just breathe. We’ve found that this really helps with idea generation as well – every year, we generate 50 or 60 new ideas from the festival that go into our pipeline.”
But the NWG Innovation Festival is about more than generating new ideas – it brings together groups of people who never would have had the opportunity to work alongside one another otherwise.
“This is an event for the whole industry,” explains Nigel. “It even brings in people from outside the industry. We’ve had 900 different organisations involved from more than 30 different countries now, and we’re having the chance to work alongside people and organisations
“Once we’ve defined the problem co-create the sprint and research been done. It’s so important experts, because we want approaching this in
that we never would have encountered before.”
Having such a diverse range of people has led to new concepts that are now in the process of revolutionising the industry.
“One of our greatest innovations to arise from the festival was the National Underground Asset Register,” says Nigel. “When we did the first Innovation Festival, three out of the six sprints – all looking at different problems – said that they needed a common underground map and came to a point where they coalesced on the idea of a solution.
“When we were planning the 2018 festival, I asked what happened to that idea, but no one wanted to share their data, which led us to a third technique. We already used design sprints and hacks, and our third approach is called ‘A year’s worth of work in a week’. We’re not trying to create any new ideas – instead, we’re taking an idea that exists and crosses organisational boundaries and trying to move it along as fast as we can in a week.
“In this case, we brought in a team of lawyers – one from our company,
problem statement, we research what’s already important to do this alongside want to make sure we’re in an original way”
one from the gas industry, one from electric and one from telecoms. We gave them a blank piece of paper and told them to create a data-sharing agreement. We had another team of people setting up the platform, a team defining the data standards, a team investigating the data and lastly a team writing an app.
“By the end of the week, we could see that we had four underground areas of Newcastle mapped. It was by no means a production-ready creation, but we were excited that it could be done.
“Our next move was building a common underground map of Sunderland, with help from Sunderland City Council and the Ordnance Survey. They then made the geospatial commission aware of the product, which is when we were very lucky to receive £4m in government funding to build this map for the whole of the North East as a pilot.
“We then moved onto London before turning our attention nationwide, and now we’re in the process of deploying that across the business. The concept took time to create, but it all came from our Innovation Festival. We
couldn’t have done this without the partnership with the government, but nothing would have been created in the first place if we hadn’t taken that initial risk.
“I’ve spoken to organisations before who say that they’re all about innovation, and the first question I always ask is ‘What’s your expected success rate?’ If they tell me that it has to be a 10 out of 10 success rate – which they often do – then I tell them that they can’t innovate with that mindset. It’s all about risk. That can lead to quite a bit of scrutiny, but you need permission to fail in order to deploy meaningful change.”
While taking that initial risk can be a challenge, Nigel explains that developing these innovations is crucial for not only for the business and the water industry, but for the overall health of the planet.
“NTT Data was a ‘Brought to you By’ sponsor of this year’s Innovation Festival, they exhibited and had several members of their team actively participating in the many sprints, providing their expertise and input along the way”
“In our business, innovation is designed to do two things,” says Nigel. “On one hand, it can improve our performance in areas such as pollution, leakage and flooding. On the other, it can help us avoid capital investments and keep customer bills low.
“One example of an innovation in our pipeline right now, that also came out of the festival, is a tool called
the Tipping Point Tool. The point of this tool is to predict the degradation of concrete. Concrete has a lifespan of typically 50 years, but this can vary greatly based on operational conditions.
“What we’re doing with this tool is looking at the details of lots of concrete assets, and using AI to work out where we should make operational interventions to prevent
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degradation. If you make small operational interventions in time, you can dramatically extend the lifespan of concrete – saving us and our customers costs, helping lower carbon emissions for the industry and offering broader benefits for the environment beyond.”
So, what’s in store for the 2025 Innovation Festival? Nigel reveals the company is looking at what it can do beyond straightforward sustainable initiatives.
“Every year, we set a theme for the festival,” explains Nigel. “This year, our theme was speed and scale, which was focused around sustainable initiatives, and setting up the water industry to be resilient in the face of climate change.
“Next year's theme is centred around regeneration. The principle behind this theme is how we need to go beyond sustainability. We need to figure out how to give nature a chance and help the planet replenish its resources. It’s time for us to have a discussion about what a regenerative water company would look like. So that’s what the festival will look like next year.”
As the Innovation Festival continues to grow Nigel reflects on its initial beginnings, and the work that so many people have put into it to make it successful.
“We have a massive ecosystem working on this festival, and it’s come a long way since the beginning,”
celebrates Nigel. “But you can’t underestimate the power of a halfbaked idea, because the first festival was definitely a half-baked idea.
“I grew up as a programmer, and I think this made me a perfectionist – I had to make sure every line of code I wrote worked under every single circumstance imaginable. I think I carried that thinking too far into my career as a leader.
“What I learned when we did the first Innovation Festival, because we went from concept to launch in a short time frame, there were dynamics people organised that I had no idea about. In some ways, I felt like I’d lost control – but in the best way possible. It was better because more people had contributed to the planning and execution, more people owned it. The festival wasn’t just mine – it was everyone’s, and we all had a vested interest in making it great. Within this journey, working with our partners has been a core component of the event’s success.
“How the festival works now is that once we’ve defined the theme we’ll go out to our ecosystem, and let them know the kind of problems we’re looking at solving within that theme, because we want to draw from a diversity of experience. It’ll be a long list of about 50 or 60 topics that we’ll send out to our key partners such as NTT Data for them to provide input on, based on their expertise. NTT Data was a ‘Brought to you By’ sponsor of this year’s Innovation Festival, they
exhibited and had several members of their team actively participating in the many sprints, providing their expertise and input along the way.
“There will be some dialogue that takes plays that effectively allows them to play to their strengths and helps us address our problem. Sometimes our partners will suggest new ideas, which we’re very open to.
“We’re very malleable on the content of the festival, as long as it’s addressing a problem that’s relevant to the industry, and ideally beyond. Defining a problem statement often feels more like an art than a science, because there are so many factors at play.
“Once we’ve defined the problem statement, we co-create the sprint and research what’s already been done. It’s so important to do this alongside experts, because we want to make sure we’re approaching this in an original way.”
Learn more about NWG here.
Young Citizens’ Work Experience Festival ADDED VALUE
“I started life as a computer programmer when I was 17,” says Nigel. “I got halfway through my A-levels and decided I knew everything I needed to know, so I dropped out. This was in 1981, when there were three million people unemployed.
“I went to the Job Centre, and they told me to go onto a programme where I could study to be an accountant or go into computer programming. On a whim, I decided to go into computer programming.
“On that programme, there was a wonderful gentleman called David Gale, who gave me a real chance to succeed and helped me get my foot on the ladder. Ever since, I’ve been trying to pay that back.
“I’ve been lucky to have the opportunity to return the gesture
VALUE
with the Innovation Festival, as we bring in young people to give them work experience. We’ve been doing this since we started the project. We’ve seen that these young people being able to put that experience down on their CV is helping them get noticed and take the next step.
“This year, we’re trying to take that a step further with our Young Citizens’ Work Experience Festival. We wanted to give 14 to 18 year olds the opportunity to come to our festival and work alongside our partners in a range of activities, and we were able to give work experience to 850 young people. I’d like to think that a few of them came out of that experience with a better understanding of what they want to do in the future.”
Connect with Nigel
