Deadline: 8-Dec-21
The Ofwat Innovation Fund (OIF) is seeking applications for its Water Breakthrough Challenge Catalyst Stream to unleash a wave of innovation in the water sector and tackle some of the major challenges of their time – delivering transformative benefits for consumers, society, and the environment.
Themes
Their five strategic innovation themes are:
- Responding and adapting to climate change, including how to meet the sector’s ambition of net-zero emissions.
- Restoring and improving the ecological status of their water environments, protecting current and future customers from the impacts of extreme weather and pollution.
- Understanding long-term operational resilience and infrastructure risks to customers and the environment, finding solutions to mitigate these in sustainable and efficient ways.
- Testing new ways of conducting core activities to deliver wider public value.
- Exploring the opportunities associated with open data, stimulating innovation and collaboration, for example, encouraging new business models and service offerings that benefit customers, including those in vulnerable circumstances.
Funding Information
- Approximately £5 million funding available.
- Individual entries can bid for £100,000 – £1 million.
Eligibility Criteria
There are 3 main categories of eligibility criteria to the Water Breakthrough Challenge:
- Lead entrant
- The lead entrant to the Water Breakthrough Challenge must be one of the 17 licensed regional water only and water and wastewater companies or new entrant water and wastewater companies (NAVs) in England and Wales. They strongly encourage lead entrants to enter the Challenge in partnership or consortia.
- Financial requirements
- They expect entry partners to make a minimum 10% financial contribution to Breakthrough Challenge entries. Customers should not bear all the risk of initiatives funded through the competition; this is also to ensure strong project management.
- The Breakthrough Challenge will cover up to 90% of each entry’s total costs. Entry partners have the flexibility to decide how the remaining 10% is funded, as long as it is not funded by charges to water customers in England and Wales. There is no requirement for it to be shared equally. Entry partners may also consider how they could bring funding from other sources.
- They are open to initiatives that have successfully secured additional external public or private funding.
- Intellectual property rights
- All entry partners must agree to and abide by the terms & conditions, including the terms around intellectual property rights (IPR).
- In setting out alternative IPR arrangements, you must be able to meet the following conditions:
- The entry will not result in restricted benefits to all customers of water companies; and
- Demonstrably, the alternative arrangements will not result in additional costs to customers.
For more information, visit https://waterinnovation.challenges.org/
