Our experience at the NWG Innovation Festival

Recently the +ADD team supported delivery of the NWG Innovation Festival.  There has been a lot of well deserved coverage for this bold and creative approach to open innovation.

The event built upon an extensive and expanding portfolio of open and agile innovation works driven by clear vision and a focus on 'innovation with purpose' by the NWG team. We have had the privilege to be involved with this journey alongside a great internal team and community.

Having worked in and around the innovation agenda in utilities for a while, this event marked a fundamental step change to pace and scale of supply chain engagement.

The event welcomed over 1000 participants to engage in a range of design led innovation sprints sponsored by major brands. As part of the initiative the +ADD Strategy team supported a diverse range of activities from sourcing sponsorship for innovation competitions to running youth engagement programmes. See more about our experience in this video:

A unique approach to a complex problem...

As part of the festival +ADD supported a unique design challenge focusing on a major industry issue. Over 20% of all water produced is wasted through leakage.  Working closely with the internal team at NWG, the initiative saw an integrated hack and sprint evolve which generated over 20 detailed concepts and more developed business cases.

The combined community represented over 160 participants from 56 organisations from the UK but also Europe, Canada and the USA.  Those engaged included customers, scientists, engineering specialists and trade suppliers, academics and data analysts from both the industry and beyond.

While the sprint focused on people, processes and systems; and the creation of businesses cases for investment, the hack considered data analytics as a means to discover new insights and enable better decision making. You can discover more about the challenge here at the innovation festival website.

The approach was unusual in that there was a common mission between the sprint and the hack. Unpacking of the problem was a shared process. Further, once established, sprints squads focussing on formed ideas and business cases called upon resource from data hack teams through a pitching session.  

This unique fusion of perspectives, ideas and the resultant concepts were stronger, better evidenced and prototyped as a result.  

For us, both the design led innovation sprint and hack were part of a broader innovation challenge and our focus on making change happen.

We are now hard at work finalising business cases with the successful teams and are engaging in building more formal foundations, principles and collaborations to turn well formed ideas and prototypes into reality.

For more information about our work in business transformation and accelerating innovation, please contact [email protected] or call 0191 313 0009