Innovation for a resilient future

Innovation isn’t just about shiny new tech—it’s about people, culture, and those small, everyday changes that add up to big impact. In this episode of the Climate Resilience Podcast, Phil sits down with Nick Law, who leads the commercial side of JBA Labs, our in-house innovation accelerator programme, and Richard Beardsley from Affinity Water to unpack what innovation really means in the face of climate change.

From building a culture that embraces failure to groundbreaking projects like JSat, JBA’s spectral analysis tool, and Resilient Studio, the trio explores how fresh ideas, bold experiments, and even small tweaks can transform how we adapt to a fast-changing world.

Tune in for insights on risk-taking, creativity, and the future of resilient places, systems, and communities.

*Please note: There are some minor audio issues in this episode. While they do not affect the overall clarity of the discussion, we appreciate your understanding and patience. Enjoy the episode!

Thank you for listening to this episode. 

For any comments, questions or insights please contact phil.emonson@jbaconsulting.com.

Visit our website jbaconsulting.com
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Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Climate Resilience Podcast brought to you by JBA Consulting. I'm Phil Emmonton and in this podcast series we unpick some of the complexities, the challenges and the opportunities on the topic of climate resilience with some inspirational thought leaders. Now, JBA's core values are share, innovate and be different. Innovation is part of our DNA. In the late 1990s, JBA were appointed by the Environment Agency to develop the first ever national foot map termed the Indicative Foot Plane. Something we developed by creating our own pioneering modeling software. More recently, we've launched JBA Labs, our innovation accelerator program, to support innovators right across the business, from scoping ideas right through to commercialisation. And so today I'm delighted that we're dedicating a whole episode to explore the role and importance of innovation in creating resilient places, resilient assets, resilient systems, and resilient organisations. And joining me are JBA's Nick Law and Richard Beardsley from Affinity Water. So welcome, chaps, to the podcast. And perhaps you'd like to start by introducing yourselves. Nick, let's come to you first.

SPEAKER_01 1:05

Hi, Phil, and thank you very much. So, yeah, I lead the commercial side of our innovation programme here at JBA called JBA Labs, as you mentioned, uh started in 2022. And my background really has been helping industry manage the risks of weather and climate through the application of science and technology, including 10 years at the Mex Office with a focus particularly on the energy and water sectors. So very pleased to be here. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:33

Great, thanks. And I think there's a lot of your experience that we're gonna talk about today. So delighted, delighted to have you, Nick. And uh Richard, over to you.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

Yeah, good morning, Phil. Um, my name's Richard Beardsley. I'm the Innovation Programme Manager for Affinity Water, and I've been in the water industry for 35 years now. I suppose you could see the first part of my career was in uh water treatment, wastewater treatment, working for Seven Trent Water. I then Spark spent the middle part of my career working business improvement, change management, transformation, and that was across both Seven Trent Water and a short time in the app one likes at Angling Water. And then the third part is really a brand innovation. And I've been working in this role for Affinity Water for just over three years now. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 2:19

Lovely, lovely. Well, welcome to the podcast, Richard. And so the obvious place to start then is what is innovation? Um, what does it mean for JBA? What does it mean for Affinity Water? And and ultimately, why should we innovate? Um Nick, I'll throw that open to you to start with.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

So um, why should we innovate? Well, uh the way I see it is we're in such a fast-changing world. You have to innovate just to keep up, not not even to get ahead, just to keep up, you have to innovate. So then to get ahead and and to be leaders and and um uh you know create real meaningful change, you have to have a really strong um and proactive innovation program. So um it it's core to what we do at JBA. Um, as you said, we created the first flood map for England um and Wales. And since then, we've continued to grow our efforts in innovation, um, particularly with this uh JBA Labs program. Um we have uh I think since I joined in 2022 with JBA Labs, we've sponsored over 250 innovation projects, some of them small projects, some of them big um, you know, transformational projects in our in our work. So really, really central to to JBA um and uh really um a central part to the people and and culture um in JBA.

SPEAKER_02 3:52

Great place to start. Thanks. Um Richard, I'll bring you in here. What what is it what does innovation mean for Affinity Water and why why do you innovate?

SPEAKER_00 4:01

Yeah, so I I I think often when people think about innovation, they think about products, nice, shiny toys, technology. But for me, the other two parts of innovation, the processes and the people, are probably more important. In fact, for me, innovation is centered upon people. So I'm really passionate about innovation in terms of our processes and our people. Um, if you think that in the next sort of 10 years, over 20% of the water industry people will be retiring. So we need to prepare our people for the future. Uh we really need to think about improving our processes, supporting our priority services customers, and all these things are innovation. Innovation doesn't need to be disruptive or groundbreaking. For me, and for Affinity, sometimes innovation is just about new. So we look all around stakeholders, customers, other water companies, other industries, our supply chain, and we try and work out what other people are doing, and and then we just sometimes include what we're doing into into what we do because providing it's new for affinity, for me, it's part of innovation.

SPEAKER_02 5:14

I'll pick up a um a little sort of strand of what you said there, which is that innovation doesn't always need to be disruptive or transformative or big, shiny eye products. Uh sometimes innovation is just nudging that frontier forward a little bit further. It it it is just taking what somebody else has already done and evolving it. So it's more of an evolution rather than coming up with something wholly transformative. Um, which I which I really like. I think it's a lovely part of the opening conversation. Um, Nick, you you were referencing 250-odd JBA lab innovation projects. Clearly, within within those, there would have been some which have been groundbreaking and uh flagship, but I would imagine uh a vast majority of those are these that that evolve existing processes or or tools or products. Is is that the case?

SPEAKER_01 6:08

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I would say that um it's it's not sometimes these innovations are um um kind of progressive, it's it's the majority really. I would say um, I've actually looked it up, um, is there a kind of a recognized portion of how much innovation is is transformational versus incremental? And you're typically um it's kind of a 90-10 rule. 90% of innovation is um, you know, kind of kind of progressive, small changes to to make things better. And actually, if you look around, we you know, we're surrounded by the uh the classic one is is is your mobile phone. You know, they they've got massive innovation teams, but within that, okay, maybe the first mobile phone was was the transformational one. Now it's all about incremental innovation. Um so yeah, so a large portion of it is incremental. And sometimes you come across the transformative innovation. Um, and we're looking for that and we're supporting that um the environment to create that transform information. But yeah, the majority of it is is incremental progress, which is you know hugely important, doctor.

SPEAKER_02 7:20

So that so that being the case then, the vast majority of of innovations are incremental, progressive. Richard, in in affinity watering, in the teams that you uh you have an involvement with, how do you get folk to actually recognise then that they are innovating? Because I think sometimes the perception is innovation, as we said, is something transformative, it's shiny, it's new. But actually, more often than not, as as as Nick's just said, actually more often than not, people are um inherently creating something that is progressive and incremental. So, how do you get folk to recognise that hey, you're doing this perhaps on a day-to-day basis, but you might not always acknowledge and realise that it it is innovation?

SPEAKER_00 8:06

Yeah, it's a it's a great point. And it for me, it's all about building a culture of innovation, and that takes time, doesn't it? I think a combination of modesty and and people just thinking it's part of the job. But we've we've got some fantastic people at Affinity, but the water industry is full of fantastic people doing some great things, but you're quite right, they don't always recognize it as innovation. So it's pointing that out to them, and and one of the big changes we we've made is we involve our people, um, our people team, our HR specialists in how we work with our people. We also use the communication team. So, for example, this afternoon I'll be recording another podcast for internal use with talking to one of our HR managers exactly about these things, about how we build this culture of innovation, how we get people involved, how we get people to recognise that actually what you're doing is great and it is moving the needle forward. It doesn't always have to be disruptive, doesn't always have to be groundbreaking, but it's actually making a real difference.

SPEAKER_02 9:09

And actually, I suppose there's a there's a there's a um follow-on part to that conversation, which is actually innovation isn't just the tools and the processes and the and the services that be used on the front end. Actually, there's all sorts of different um business departments and services um that actually in and of themselves would benefit from and do benefit from moving that dial um and and making the that progress. Um Richard, you mentioned the phrase there, the culture of innovation. I'd like us to look at cultural uh organizational culture, I think, next. Um because innovation by its nature, I think is is is risky or involves an element of risk. What you're doing is you're committing investment of time, personnel, resources, it funding to the development of a system or tool or process that may not always achieve its desired outcome first time. And that's great because that's part of the learning. That's really important. We had that discussion about well, why bother? And Nick pointed out very eloquently at the start that actually we need to we need to innovate to stay in touch and stay in the game. And actually, if you want to get ahead, you need that strong innovation culture. So I think there's an interesting thing here about risk appetite within a within an organization and having that strong leadership from directors and senior leaders to make that investment and to balance the risk, of course. It's risk versus reward. Um, so I suppose I'll come back to you on that then, Richard. What's the culture like in Affinity Water and and what's your perception of this sort of risk appetite?

SPEAKER_00 10:58

Yeah, so I'm I'm really lucky. We've got a great chief executive, Keith Hazlitt, who is really supportive of innovation. I'll be meeting him next week to talk about potential bids we've got for the off-water innovation fund this time. He fully understands been in the water industry a long time, he fully understands the risk profile. I mean, clearly we do everything we can to try and manage and mitigate the risks. Uh, and also we understand that if things are going wrong, we need to do course correction, or sometimes we need to stop the project altogether. And Keith fully understands that, but he also understands that without taking some calculated risks, we're actually never, we're never really going to get the progression that we could get. So it's really important that you do understand that innovation does carry perhaps a higher risk profile in terms of TRLs, technology-based levels, and other aspects, but it's really important that we still do innovation work and key pulley guess that.

SPEAKER_02 11:56

And and Nick, uh, bring you in here. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

Yeah, uh I I this is a really fascinating area. And I think there's two there's two parts to it. There's the there's creating that um that culture where and and the things that um so people are involved in innovation, we don't break it down. They need they need space and time to to be creative. Creation um happens when you're relaxed and you're not your creative best when you're stressed or busy. You need space and time to create, you need um a safe and supported environment. Um, if you're involved in innovation, so you feel comfortable um pushing things forward. Um, you need to be open to failure and um that's something that we're particularly working on because uh is it's kind of ironic. We're like you know, JBA is about uh helping industry and society mitigate the risks of um our changing weather and climate. So we're about reducing risks, so we're not naturally risk takers. So we do have to work hard to create this culture that actually it's okay to take risks and and to fail. So that's a really big part of it, is is you're creating that culture. And um the other really important thing um that we prioritized as a labs team is is communication because you've got to really reach across all of your organization. There's so many different people involved. I've I found you you kind of have these groups of people that are really confident in in innovating, and they're the ones that naturally step up. But actually, innovation uh crosses all areas of the company. You need your you know, your visionaries, but you also need the administrators, you need project managers, you need connectors and networkers, you need problem solvers, you need adopters. So you've really got to get into all of those areas. And from a lab's perspective, we um we've got two main um, well, we've got lots of different communication channels with webinars and posts on the internet and things like that. But we also try and reach people directly through what we call roadshows, where we go out to the offices um and have spend face-to-face time with people talking about innovation, getting them comfortable, talking about taking risks and telling them about the sort of network we're we're creating for them. Um, and then we also have something called open mic, where people can phone in on a one-to-one basis without being in front of people and just you know, launch a crazy blue sky idea or ask questions about um innovation just to help them get that confidence and get things moving. So, yeah, it's really, really big part of our our overall effort as a as a um labs innovation team.

SPEAKER_02 14:50

And if I may say, Nick, um as a recipient, really impressive as well. And and it's always been great to uh to work with you guys. And I think the the the the processes that you just described there in terms of well, how do you get into all those different parts of the business? How do you get in in touch with the innovators, the blue sky thinkers, the creators, but also uh the project managers, or how do you get this, which is part of our DNA, as I said at the start, it's one of our core values. How do you build that without that culture with our new starters? Yeah, and budgets and apprentices, you know, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

It's it's very, it's it's very hands-on, it's very intensive, intensive. You need to keep pushing, you can't do it and then back off and expect everyone to just suddenly be, you know, running away with innovation. It's a continual process, but it's actually the most fun part of it. You know, meeting people, talking to people, getting inspiration from people, and hopefully inspiring people. It's uh for me, it's you know, it's the most fun part of the whole process.

SPEAKER_02 15:53

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and that and that culture around um uh invested commerce failure is an interesting one because you know, cards on the table here. I developed a a tool in JBA um about 18 months ago, which we had very high hopes for, um, and we wanted to to really embed at a at a project level, actually, on on all projects in in in JBA. And the concept was great. Um we did a bit of piloting, did a little bit of testing, rolled it out, and it just didn't quite have the resonance and the impact that we thought it would. So that's that's cool. We've gone back to the drawing board because the concept is right, it's in the application. So we're now rescoping, we're re-reworking that. We've taken the learning. Um, and you that that that sort of um that feeling you have of where you go, oh, that's not quite hitting the mark, actually. But we're getting some feedback. It it there is a little bit of a low there, you know, a low moment there where you think, oh, is this the right thing to pursue? Should we put more time to it? Actually, that's a really important part because it'll be easy to walk away. But that's if you know if the concept is right and you know it's there's a there's a really important need for the business, then you take the learning and you go back and rescope.

SPEAKER_01 17:02

Um so can I just add we uh last last week? I was at the um Institute of Water Annual Conference and the first few sessions around innovation. Um, one of the award companies um innovation managers, I can't remember which one it was, Richard, but they um they actually have an award for you know their innovation awards and they reward people for stepping up and being a part of it and delivering, but they also have a specific award for failure in innovation where they celebrate an innovation that's failed and take a learning from it and turn it into a really positive thing. And I thought that that was brilliant, having that specific recognition that you've done something good by failing. I I think that's brilliant. So we're gonna um look at how we can adopt that into uh into our processes.

SPEAKER_02 17:52

Um final part of the podcast, then, and I want to dedicate a little bit of time to this really, is Affinity Water, JBA have a number of tools, case studies, projects, where those innovation uh processes that we've been talking about have brought something to the fore. It has created a flagship product or a flagship um service. So let's talk about some of those successes. Um Richard, let's start with you. Uh yeah. What in terms of the JSAT platform feel was that? Do you felt absolutely yeah, start with that one?

SPEAKER_01 18:28

Well, yeah, I mean, I can cover that. Or if you've got other things that we don't know of in Inafinity, what's been your kind of big innovation?

SPEAKER_00 18:35

Yeah, extraordinary. Let me start then with one of the big affinities. We've got a project off what Innovation Fund Project called water neutrality at NAVSides, which which has been a really great learning experience for us. And what what it's basically doing is looking at the issue of demand management. So the water industry in the UK has high water demand, as you will appreciate. And it's trying to understand that the levers that that manage that, that dictate that high demand. Is it behavioural or is it to technology? What why is the demand so high? What can you do to reduce the demand? Is it is really the thinking behind it. So the project that we're working on looks at behavioural changes, trying to influence customer behaviors. It then looks at technology like water reduction, um, technology in the house, or low, low-usage toilets, low usage sinks, etc. And then it looks at the combination of both. Is so is the right thing to do to put all your efforts into managing behaviors? Is it to find technologies that use little water, or is it a combination of both? And that's been really interesting because for me, it blends the the products, the people, the process that we talked about earlier. So that's a really exciting thing, thing that affinity are still doing. And also we're working on something called um support for all, which is around the priority services register, and that's something I'm particularly passionate about. It's reaching customers who may struggle for whatever reason to interact with affinity using the conventional channels. So it might be they've got sight issues or hearing issues or or neurodiversity issues, but whatever it is, is trying to understand how we can better support those communities. So for me, that that's the exciting bit. Moving to the JSAP platform, I don't know if you want to start talking about that, Nick, and I'll perhaps doing yeah, yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 20:38

Um, but first, if if you learn anything about um the behavioral um activities of the the shower, I would be keen to learn that because uh time when my kids have showers, time stands still, and uh I I I failed to influence that on any level. But um, but uh with JSAT, yeah. So we've got we've got two in our innovation program at the moment, we've got two flagship um innovations um which are have got external applications specifically built. So the first one I'll talk about is is resilient studio, and this is incredible, and I think it's going to be transformational um with regards to climate change adaptation. It's a it's a technology that supports integrated catchment and coastal management, and it helps plan adaptation pathways for climate change, considering a range of resilience measures and allows you to interactively evaluate the impacts and trade-offs of different adaptation strategies. Um, and ultimately helps uh optimize very large scale investments from ward companies or councils or governments, things like that. It's quite a hard thing to describe without seeing it, but it's it's a really um really fantastic software that's probably at uh at the technology range level set. And in kind of demo stage. And there's nothing like it out there. So that's really, really exciting stuff. Another one which Affinity knows very well because we've developed a collaboration with them is this JSAP platform you mentioned. And this is also a first. And this is a remote sensing tool that uses satellite images and machine learning to automatically detect changes in caption that might pose a risk to drinking water quality. And through the Web GIS platform, it alerts capture managers to do these emerging changes so that they can be much more proactive in mitigating these potential risks. So, and that's that is transformational from a water company perspective because caption managers might have insight into what's happening in a catchment every few years. They're trying to manage potentially hundreds of thousands of hectares. This changes it into you can have some form of insight into catchment activities on on a weekly basis. So that is really transformational. And that's something that I've been um very involved in in the last couple of years. Um and that's now um thanks to the the the great work withinity water, the JBA, that's now being adopted across the um the UK water centre. But again, there's a whole load, there's a whole future set of innovations to come from that platform, which is equally as exciting.

SPEAKER_02 23:38

Richard, did you have any comments on on JSAT in particular?

SPEAKER_00 23:43

Yeah, I I took it to our innovation hearing group to review last week, and they were really impressed by it, Phil. They thought it was a really, really good idea. And and I'm also discussing it with our chief executive and chief finance officer on Tuesday next week, the 30th. And then hopefully it'll be positive news from that meeting as well.

SPEAKER_01 24:03

This is this is for the next generation. So collaborative, we created this functioning this functioning tool. Now we're looking ahead through the Off-Wat innovation program. What's the next series of innovations we can bring into the platform to address really tough issues in catchment management, like uh, you know, PFAS and transport of pollutants and storage of hazardous materials, things like that. So it's it's gonna be a really um and you know, really uh interesting area to work on. And I expect some parts of that are gonna fail. Um, but we're gonna push ahead and see what we can what we can come out with.

SPEAKER_02 24:45

Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, I hope uh yeah, think fingers crossed for the future development then of of JSAP. Um look, thanks for a great, a great discussion, chaps. We've we've covered a lot there in quite a short amount of time. And you know, going back to the start, Nick, you know, you you you've sort of said why why we need to innovate is because the world is changing around us and we need to innovate to stay in touch, let alone, let alone get ahead. And we've we've touched on risk culture, we've touched on products and people and and and processes. Um and and I think what's evident is that if we're to build whole society resilience to climate change, and if we're to create resilient places and resilient people, resilient assets, resilient landscapes and resilient organizations, then we need new ways of working. We need new tools and processes, we need to increment, and we need to provide the space for creativity and the willingness to learn. Um, so yeah, thank you for a great contribution and conversation today. It's been really enjoyable. So thank you for um uh listening to us today. We've reached the end of our time. As always, if you enjoyed listening, then please hit the subscribe button so you're ready for the next episode in a few weeks' time. Till then, thanks for joining us. I'm Phil Emmonson, and you've been listening to the Final Citics Podcast brought to you by Jacob.