Spring Forward

MD Carly Perry champions Spring’s innovation capabilities that will help the water sector rise to AMP8 challenges.

It is perfectly clear that PR24 will bring both challenges and opportunities for the water sector. The rapid expansion of the capital programme paired with high levels of scrutiny and tight budgets will necessitate cost efficiency, innovation, new ways of working and greater collaboration.

Carly Perry, managing director of Spring, the UK water innovation centre of excellence, is without doubt that her organisation can help the sector step up to the plate. “The sector is under more pressure than it ever has been,” she says. “It feels like we say that every year, but the pressure does keep getting higher and higher. With AMP8 at the moment, we’re looking at £88bn of investment and that means the need for efficiency is higher to keep the cost down for customers. Spring is for the benefit of both water companies and suppliers and the value proposition behind Spring is all around bringing efficiency, whether that’s allowing innovation teams to refocus efforts on other things, building collaborative trials that then reduce spend internally or providing a faster path from idea to impact. It’s now year two of resourced operations from us and I think the value case for Spring is getting stronger.”

A happy coincidence is that, at this juncture, “we’re starting to see the value from some of the experiments and the maturing service offerings that we’ve been running, which is great”.

Spring was conceptualised and launched in 2020-21, with the early focus on building the brand and establishing a small team. It suffered a blow in 2022 when hoped-for growth funding from Ofwat’s innovation competition was not forthcoming. But from adversity comes strength. Perry reflects: “I tell you what, I think it was probably the best thing for us, because it rallied everybody around funding us and supporting us.”

A new funding approach was built. This features subscriptions from all of the water companies according to size (following UKWIR’s model, which is Spring’s parent organisation), supported by seed funding from seven supply chain companies. Perry explains these were chosen for their ability to help steer strategy and support growth as well as their ability to contribute financially. She gives a big shout out to each of them: Fujitsu, Mott MacDonald, Schneider Electric, Skewb, Capgemini, Jacobs and RSK.

In addition, Spring built a sponsorship model for its ‘Accelerator’ work – under which it identifies a specific problem, puts out a call for innovation, and mobilises trials with multiple water companies to try out ideas. RSE has just been announced as the sponsor of Accelerator 4, which is focused on emerging contaminants – see here.

Key services

Over the past two years, Spring has used the funding provided and lessons learned along the way to develop a number of core service offerings – all of which have already provided value and could make significant contributions to AMP8 challenges.

Among these are:

• Spring Accelerator – Three rounds – on net zero, delivering resilient infrastructure and river health – have already been completed. Seventeen innovations are being progressed. Perry shares that a key learning has been that a one-size-fits-all challenge statement is not optimal given diversity in the industry on interest areas, innovation maturity and other matters. “So we’ve now moved to a portfolio approach. What we did this time is we created two challenge statements at the same time…so every water company has an interest in one of those statements.”
• Knowledge sharing – This takes various forms, from a searchable online case study library open to all, to recordings of two-hour showcases Spring has hosted in which water companies and their partners offer deep dive insights into projects they have run. These include sharing objectives, insights, what worked and didn’t work and any adoption recommendations. In all, over 4,000 people have engaged with the showcases from over ten countries. 1,500 people are subscribed to Spring’s sharing platform. Perry comments: “The knowledge sharing side of things, I would say is a bit of a jewel in the crown of the service offering that every single company finds value in.”

Spring is further developing this, and over the past 12 months has worked with Ofwat as the knowledge sharing supplier to its Innovation Fund competitions. This follows a 2022 report on the fund which called for greater knowledge sharing in the sector to support the rollout of innovation. Spring and the regulator have agreed six best practice knowledge sharing principles, which include learning from what already exists before committing to further innovation, and keeping sector knowledge open and centralised. “What we’re trying to avoid is siloed, fragmented knowledge all over the place,” Perry explains, including by bringing learnings emerging through Ofwat fund projects to a wider audience.

She continues on knowledge sharing: “I see this being a huge growth space over the next five years. So far, it’s been quite reactionary, in terms of somebody comes to us and says, ‘I want to share on this’. We want to be proactive; we want to say, ‘what knowledge do you need and we’ll go find it for you’. That could be from within the sector, on the global scale, or out of sector.”

• Brokerage – This is new, and emerged as the top request from the market following a March strategy day. It will involve Spring linking water companies up with their peers and others inside and outside the sector to collaborate on innovation trials, bids and other initiatives. “We understand the innovation priorities of all the water companies, so we can do that matchmaking,” Perry says.

Business objectives

Learnings from these and other experiences, as well as changes and developments in the market, have prompted Spring to revisit its business objectives, which date from 2020. “The original ones were quite broad,” says Perry, “and we wanted to be more focused.” The new objectives are to:

• Enable effective delivery of innovation and collaboration by creating centralised intelligence.
• Increase the visibility of innovation needs, opportunities and priorities and broker between water companies, innovators and broader stakeholders to deliver trials and solutions.
• Increase knowledge sharing by building intelligence on what already exists, lessons learned and adoption best practice principles.

Alongside providing valuable services, Perry shares that “not being afraid of stopping something if it’s not working” is part of the mix. A good example is creating communities around hot topics. This was part of the original ambition but has proved resource intensive, often duplicative of other groups already in existence, and low value. “So very quickly, we pulled together everybody who’d asked us to do it and made a decision to close this down.” She adds: “That’s the kind of culture that we want to see around innovation as well. Give it a good go, but if it’s not working, that’s okay. There are lessons in that.”

Spring has been in discussions with its partners about what level of ambition and value delivery it should target for the future, as well as how to further prioritise its service offering, and how best to measure performance. “Consistently, everybody has said, ‘let’s increase value; let’s increase our ambition levels’. So it’s really positive to hear that and know that water companies want to support accelerated innovation.”

Perry is now talking to sector leaders about forward funding, from March 2025 when the existing subscription agreements expire. These totalled around £1m in 2023-24. “My hope is to double that for the next AMP,” she says, adding that a five year agreement rather than the two year settlement held to date is also important for Spring’s development. “Then we could streamline governance, and not need to constantly justify our existence, if we are all at a point where we agree there’s trust and we’ve all agreed what we want to do for the next five years. Let’s let the team crack on and deliver it –  obviously with KPIs and metrics and all of that useful monitoring.” She notes here too that with a team of nine to ten people: “Putting the same level of scrutiny on us as you would a large corporation can sink us. So we have to be governed and monitored in a way that suits a small, agile organisation.”

High and more sustainable levels of funding against an agreed priority programme would help Spring help the sector to rise to PR24 and global challenges. In fact, one thing Perry has in sight in particular is looking outside of the UK more. We meet in Toronto at the IWA World Water Congress (see p22) where the Spring team is busy connecting with global innovators “and letting them know that the UK and Ireland water companies are open for business”. PFAS has been a particularly hot topic of discussion, she shares, which aligns with the emerging contaminants theme of Accelerator 4. Spring will also be at the Stockholm World Water Week. “If we do manage to increase our subscriptions, there’s so much more that we can be doing on this global scale,” she says. “So far this has been quite reactionary – for instance, I’ve been at a conference and formed a relationship with someone – but I would love to be much more strategic about it.”

Spring is also leading on the refresh of the water sector’s innovation strategy to 2050, which will be five years old in 2025. “It doesn’t need a huge refresh, because it’s supposed to be high level, a North Star that we all go towards. However, there’s probably about 10-20% of it that could do with revisiting given things like net zero targets have changed and government ambitions have changed. From around October time, will be starting to kick off that refresh and we’ll be going out to the sector to make sure all the right voices are involved.”

Unlocking more

All round, since The Water Report last touched base in depth with Spring, there has been a lot of progress. Perry reflects: “I always want us to be moving faster. I always want us to be delivering more value. But if I look back at the last time we sat down, things were very uncertain… and now I think our relationship with the water sector is in an incredibly strong place.”

She continues: “I do think we’re making progress. I think as with everything in the sector, we need to be honest and realistic about how difficult things are at the moment, and there is a long way to go. But in my positive framing of that, that means there’s a lot of opportunity for us to help. There’s so much more that we can be doing, and based on what we’ve achieved in these last two years, with a tiny team and a lot against us, I think now, with all of this extra support behind us, we can really unlock more.”

She concludes: “We recognise that we need to create a service offering where there’s something for everyone. I describe it as a smorgasbord, a pick’n’mix. You need to be able to come and pick the bits that you find of value. My approach is, if we’re creating something valuable, they will come and engage with it.”

This article, authored by The Water Report, is featured in the September 2024 issue.