Deadline: 16-Nov-21
The Ofwat Innovation Fund (OIF) is seeking applications for its Water Breakthrough Challenge Transform 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.
The Challenge aims to spark ambitious innovation and enable new approaches and ways of working; equipping the water sector to address the big challenges facing the sector, driving far-reaching and long-lasting benefits to customers, society and the environment across England and Wales now and into the future.
Areas for innovation
- They are looking for your ideas that address the big challenges facing the water sector – aligned with Ofwat’s five strategic innovation themes. They aim to fund a wide range of entries that will showcase a diverse mix of innovative ways of working and solutions.
- They identified a number of innovation enablers that will be particularly critical to growing the water sector’s capacity.
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 £34 million funding available.
- Individual entries can bid for £1 million – £10 million.
Eligibility Criteria
There are four eligibility criteria in the Transform stream of Breakthrough 2:
- Lead entrant – The lead entrant must be a water company (including NAVs) in England and Wales.
- Funding requested – the entry must be seeking between £1 million and £10 million from the Fund.
- 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.
- Terms & conditions – All entry partners must agree to abide by the terms and conditions.
For more information, visit https://waterinnovation.challenges.org/