Call for Innovation – Spring Accelerator 3

Spring Accelerator 3 is looking for innovations to answer the question: “How can we integrate enhanced catchment monitoring capabilities to inform proactive decision-making and better protect source water health and the environment?”

A water catchment is a water body (for example, rivers, reservoirs, seas, and groundwaters) and the area of land that surrounds it. Human activity in a catchment can impact the water within in multiple ways, including but not limited to runoff from land use, abstraction from water bodies, and returning water to the environment. Safeguarding these water bodies is a crucial part of our efforts to protect the natural environment and is essential for our health, well-being and economic prosperity.

Spring invites innovators to provide solutions to help us better understand, monitor and take action about the challenges and opportunities in water catchments to help protect source water health and the environment.

Spring Accelerator 3 aims to identify and support solutions that bridge the gaps in enhanced catchment monitoring. Data collection is an element of this, but delivering the capability to make sense of and use this data is equally vital. The aim of this Accelerator is to provide integrated insights and forecasting abilities, augmenting the capabilities of water utility decision-makers. Successful solutions for Spring Accelerator 3 will not only help safeguard the environment but help water companies operate more efficiently, saving them time, money, resources and reducing regulatory breaches.

Read the Call For Innovation to find out more about the challenge.

Who can apply?

The Accelerator is open to all innovators who have an idea or solution that addresses the challenge statement. Applicants may be individuals, businesses or a partnership between the two. You can submit more than one entry to the Challenge.

Innovators can be UK-based or international. Priority will be given for solutions not previously trialled in the UK and Ireland.

Benefits

The goal of the Spring Accelerator is to speed up the process of finding, progressing, and adopting solutions to a given water industry challenge. This means that those who successfully navigate the accelerator process will go on to progress their solution with one or more water utilities. This could take the form of mentoring, a collaborative trial to test the solution in context, or anything in between.

Following Water Company engagement, Spring’s Knowledge Transfer service will provide easily shared project outputs, creating sector-wide project legacy and making it easier for teams to communicate the intricacies of their project to a wider audience.

At this time, financial support is not offered as part of the Spring Accelerator process. Project / trial delivery is at the discretion of the water companies involved.