We were delighted to once again be invited to support the Northumbrian Water Group (NWG) Innovation Festival, and wanted to share our approach to developing, designing and holding an innovation sprint. Luke Hampson, Geovation’s Partnership and Outreach Manager, writes:

The annual festival, now in its 7^th year of running, has attracted over 15,000 people since 2017 and has become a highlight in the global innovation calendar. With an overall aim to “tackle big world challenges, the innovation festival brings people together from across the world, to work on several (forty, in fact!) challenge areas – with a focus (predominantly, but not exclusively) on the Water industry.

So, what was our focus to be this year and how did we design and deliver the sprint? 

Our approach 

Our sprint was called “It’s in our DMA” and before explaining anything further, let’s explain what a DMA is. DMA’s – or District Metered Areas – were originally created to break the water network down into discreet zones. These zones are now used water companies to monitor and manage leakage. A DMA is to the water industry, what a Postcode is to the logistics industry! In terms of the associated problems and challenges with DMA’s, these are both varied and plentiful, so the NWG team had completed a piece of research before the sprint, which summarised the challenges and set some objectives for our sprint.  With these challenges in mind, we set about designing our sprint.

We used our tried and tested innovation formula to base the sprint on – the same approach we take with our startups and corporate partners. It helps focus everyone’s minds into three distinct and simple areas of focus:

So often, in our experience, there’s a tendency to neglect any one given value to the above equation – for example, racing ahead to creating a solution and not fully understanding or giving sufficient time/effort to get under the skin of the problem you’re trying to solve. Or perhaps you understand the problem, have a good solution in mind – but neglect the Execution element and therefore, the innovation effort can fail. Giving even weight to each area helps the innovation process.  

With the above framework in mind, we designed the weeks activities around this: 

Day 1 – Problem:

Day one was all about problem identification, definition and articulation. We really got under the hood of the problem, asking questions such as: What is the problem we are trying to solve? Who does it affect? Why does it matter to them?  

We used a “Sailboat” methodology/metaphor to understand the problems (and capture good points/best practices currently in place too) linked to how Water companies are using DMA’s. By the end of the day – we generated a number of themes and problem statements from this work. 

Day 2: Solution: Ideation and forming solutions 

On the second day, we started to think about Solution and Ideation. When thinking about Solutions to the Problems, we wanted everyone to think about question such as: What benefits does your solution provide? How are you testing that your solution has potential? Why is your solution better than alternatives?  

In preparation for day two, we had formed a number of problem statements/categories that had emerged from the Sailboat exercise. Having a challenge statement that starts with “How might we…” really helps when forming these statements and is a crucial part of any problem-solving exercise.  

Additionally, we’d predicted ahead of the sprint that Data would be a major ingredient to many solutions that could be put forward, so with this in mind, we drew upon one of the tools developed in our Geovation Playbook: The Data Mapping Canvas.

This canvas helped all in the sprint share information around: 

1. Data that they currently use to manage/monitor DMA’s.  
2. Data that is available, but which they don’t currently use; and  
3. Data that they don’t use or have access to – but could be a ‘nice to have’. 

We then used storyboarding as a means of prototyping and brining ideas to life.

Day 3: Execution: building towards delivering a pitch 

The final day of our sprint saw us embark upon bringing everything together (the Problems & Solutions we’d generated) into a ‘next steps’ phase – otherwise known as the Execution phase in our innovation formula.  

How will the ideas save money? What sort of efficiency gains might be achieved and what are the next steps to start scaling the solution? What is your unfair advantage for success? 

These were the type of questions we were asking the innovators to think about and we used the final exercise/canvas of the week to do this, namely our Geovation ‘Pitch Planning Canvas’ with associated prompting questions. Using this canvas, leaves no stone unturned in terms of things to think about when preparing for a business pitch – whether you’re an entrepreneur or an intrapreneur, so it was a hugely useful tool to use to prepare.  

After completing the canvas – teams then built their pitch deck, around the I = P x S x E formula. 

All of the ideas were then taken to an executive team at NWG and some very promising results come out of what we developed during the week, with the industry hoping to use data and digitisation more effectively in how they manage and monitor DMA’s more effectively. 

If you’re interested in finding out more about how our innovation approach could support your innovation activities, book an informal chat with one of the team here.