From Pirates to Pioneers
The challenge:
Introducing innovation and new ways of working should be straightforward. In practice, however, the real challenge is not generating ideas, it is sharing, embedding, scaling, and sustaining them across organisations and the wider water and construction industries.
While individual companies and sectors are delivering innovative solutions, there is currently no consistent mechanism to share, adopt, and operationalise these innovations as business-as-usual (BAU) across organisations.
Contributing challenges include:
- Fragmented innovation landscapes across companies and sectors, limiting visibility, sharing capabilities and reuse.
- Barriers to adoption, where solutions remain in pilots, case studies, or databases rather than being shared and implemented at scale
- Competitive tension within industries, which can restrict open, honest sharing of successful approaches
- A lack of structured pathways to roll out innovation sector-wide
- Cultural and behavioural barriers, including trust, ownership, and resistance to change
- The opportunity is to shift from isolated innovation to a collaborative, cross-industry model - where learning is proactively shared, adapted, and embedded within a structure to create value at scale and to enable delivery at pace.
This sprint will take a practical, action-oriented approach to understanding how innovation can move beyond pilots and research projects and become fully embedded across water and construction organisations and industries.
Through this sprint, we will:
- Bring in learning from other industries where successful innovation sharing practices are thriving amongst partnerships
- Explore how innovation is currently shared, identifying what works and where gaps exist
- Define how innovations can be translated into BAU – ensuring they’re usable, scalable and transferable
- Examine how regulator-funded innovation could be better leveraged, including creating pathways for wider adoption
- Explore and address the human factors of innovation, including culture, organisational psychology and trust.
- Explore if or how a digital solution could help
- Understand how innovation could integrate with design processes and it’s links with risk and value
The object is to design a repeatable, industry-relevant approach that ensures innovations are not just created – but used, shared, and sustained. This in turn should help to embed new ways of working and help to drive a step change in delivery performance across the water and construction sectors.
Participants will collaborate through a series of structured and interactive sessions to:
- Align on the cross-industry innovation challenge alongside AMP8 delivery requirements
- Review examples from water, gas, construction and other sectors
- Map current barriers to sharing and adoption
- Co-design a future-state approach for sharing and scaling innovation
- Prototype tools, frameworks, or processes for organisations and partnerships
- Develop a clear, actionable implementation plan
By the end of the sprint, we aim to deliver:
- A partnership and cross-industry innovation adoption framework
- A prototype toolkit or model for sharing and embedding innovation
- A practical plan to support rollout
- Defined cultural and behavioural principles to encourage trust and collaboration
- Clear recommendations for how organisations can ensure outputs are used in practice – not just trialled and put on the shelf.
- Water sector organisations and partners
- Construction and infrastructure delivery teams
- Innovation leads and PMOs
- Regulators and funding bodies
- Cross-sector collaborators seeking to scale innovation
