Northumbrian Water Group, owners of Northumbrian Water and Essex and Suffolk Water, is aiming to become the most innovative and forward thinking company in the water industry as part of their 2020 - 2025 business plan.

Essex & Suffolk Water recently hosted its first ever ‘Day of Innovation′ , building on ideas generated at the Northumbrian Water Innovation Festival 2018, which took place in Newcastle in July.

More than 250 innovation experts, scientists, engineers, designers, artists, customers and representatives from major global businesses came together in Essex for the special one-day event, which saw 13 ‘sprint sessions′ take place, each tasked with a major social and environmental challenge to solve.

The Day of Innovation was an opportunity to develop and test the big ideas that came out of these sprints, through a series of workshops, tech demos and interactive presentations.

Some of the major ideas showcased and developed during the day included underground maps, wellbeing apps, travel assistance for the visually impaired, smart devices to monitor the water, ‘dog bogs′, self-sustaining homes and a ‘drop swap′ so people can save money as they save water.

A team from the ‘Blue Planet′ sprint even took the event on tour and headed into Billericay to speak to around 40 local businesses about becoming Refill stations, with many signing up on the day. Refill is the national campaign that urges people to ditch single use plastics by filling up their reusable water bottles at Refill points across the country.

The only water company to sit on the CBI innovation Council, Northumbrian Water is looking beyond the water industry for inspiration and hosts an Innovation Panel, which brings together experts from global customer service leaders including Apple, Amazon and IBM to challenge their thinking to help get the most from innovation.

Earlier this year the company won the Digital Innovation Award at the prestigious Business in the Community (BITC) Responsible Business Awards, in recognition for its innovative approach to reducing flood risk.

The company is currently working on a number of industry leading innovative projects including:

• Smart sewers: NWG is the first company in the world to install a fibre-optic ‘nervous system′ in a live sewer network. The innovative technology, developed by nuron, a company set up to exploit the growth of fibre for high speed digital communications to support the wastewater industry, enables us to measure water depth, flow and temperature in real time, every five metres along a sewer pipe. Using this data NWG can manage their sewer network proactively and predict and resolve issues before incidents occur
• Digital Twin models: which are replicas of NWG′s physical assets, systems and processes to provide the best environment for them and their partners to experiment and run large-scale simulations using cloud-computing power;
• Innovation Festival 19: Annual Innovation Festivals to push through innovative ideas at scale and speed, and to promote innovation within the company. The festival has been held two years running with thousands of attendees.

NWG Group Information Services Director Nigel Watson said:

"Super-charging our innovation culture is essential if we are to continue to deliver world class experiences to our customers and if we are to become the industry leaders in this field.

"It′s the target we′ve set ourselves, and it′s an ambitious one, but we′ll continue to rise to this challenge by finding new solutions, working in partnership, and adapting the very best from within and beyond the sector to help get there."

“At NWG we firmly believe that innovation is key if we are to continue delivering unrivalled experiences for our customers, and in our recent business plan submission to OFWAT we made the ambitious pledge to lead in innovation in the water sector and beyond.”