Future Towns Innovation Hub quick visit
This was just a quick visit to the Future Towns Innovation Hub (on LinkedIn) as they were hosting an event.
I will be going back another day to understand what they do and what they cover in terms of what the future town can look like through innovation.
They are based in the Engineering Centre on the Southampton Science Park and what impresses me every time I go there, admittedly this was my second time, is to see a hotel just before the entrance and a childcare facility. If we want to make getting back into work more accessible for everyone, having childcare there is an enabler. Also, whether it’s for remote workers visiting their head office for a few days, or visitors to the companies on the park, the hotel just there is a win-win situation.
As they are just down the road from Bournemouth, it was easy for me to take a trip and attend the event that was under the banner of Clean Water South. These are made up of academic researchers, subject matter experts, suppliers, charities, residents groups and Ofwat were also there when I attended. This was their second meeting.
Water, sewerage, discharges and so on are such an emotive subject and there could be a lot of blame and questions of company finances but this group were there to listen to the details, the challenges and not necessarily to the newspaper headlines.
When you have an industry that cuts across multiple regulators it can be difficult to satisfy all of the requirements at once, it might be that you meet a target from one regulator and have to take a hit/fine from another regulator as it would be very difficult or near impossible because of the work needed for the first item.
Storm overflows takes the headlines and it was acknowledge in the room that action groups are a good thing and it pushes politicians on policy that then get fed back through the regulators.
I also learnt that there is a lot more stuff going into rivers, say from farming, and into the sewerage from all the stuff that we chuck down, and from the construction industry that could reduce so much run off into the drains. We have our own role to play when it comes to water. We improved on the home recycling front, so this is a new area that we can also get better.
What was particularly interesting to me, from the perspective of this blog, is that I asked a question on collaboration being key to innovation, and having diversity as part of that to which the person from Spring Innovation said they reach outside of the water sector in sharing the requirements they see coming from the sector. They try to bridge across the various bodies and funding sources, to get the best for the sector.
