Collaboration in Innovation - Does it help or hinder? with Mike Rose, Chief Executive of  UK Water Industry Research (UKWIR)

[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange 15-minute podcast, in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, inform, and educate other water sector leaders from around the globe.
[00:00:10] Piers Clark: My name's Piers Clark and my guest today is Mike Rose, the new Chief Executive at UKWIR, the UK Water Industry Research, and we're gonna be talking about collaboration and research. Does it help or does it hinder?
[00:00:23] Piers Clark: Mike, wonderful to have you with us today.
[00:00:26] Mike Rose: Thank you Piers for the invitation to come and talk to you. It's been great to work with you as I've started this role.
[00:00:31] Piers Clark: Well, I wanna know about your background. Take me back a few decades and just fill in the gaps. How did you get to where you are today?
[00:00:38] Mike Rose: I'm getting on for nearly 30 years in water and infrastructure. I started my career in the northwest of England with United Utilities working in operational roles and progressed, through the organization and ended up in asset management where I took on a variety of strategy and regulation roles helping organization through strategic regulatory reviews and also operational incidents. The second part of my career, I spent building both advisory services and technology businesses for Arcadis in the UK and internationally working with asset owners and operators in road, rail, energy and water to make sustainable decisions and develop and transform how they operated as organizations.
[00:01:23] Piers Clark: Brilliant, three decades in the water sector. You've been in infrastructure, you've been in technology, you've been on the utility side, you've been on the supplier side. Wonderful, no wonder you are in the role you're in now.
[00:01:35] Piers Clark: So, what were you doing just before you arrived at UKWIR?
[00:01:38] Mike Rose: I established myself as an independent advisor and had actually been working in the UK water sector, helping a number of UK water companies set themselves up when the opportunity was presented to me by the current board of UKWIR, to explore the potential of leading the organization as my predecessor departed. And it just felt like a really kind of symbiotic fit where, as you say, some of those skills that I'd developed and experiences that I'd had fit the needs of what the board wanted for the organization going forward.
[00:02:09] Piers Clark: What I like there is just before you took this role, you were actually working in a small company. So, you've done big company, you've done small company, you've been across them all. Alright, now for lots of people listening to this, they won't ever have heard of UKWIR, "UK WIR", or United Kingdom's Water Industry Research.
[00:02:26] Piers Clark: So, imagine this is the first time I've been introduced to UKWIR. What is it?
[00:02:31] Mike Rose: We are a collaboration platform for delivering exceptional, impartial research to some of the sector's biggest challenges and problems. We have been established for over 30 years, supported by our 18 UK and Irish water company members also working internationally , collaborating with the Global Water Research Coalition amongst others along with academia, the supply chain and regulators to understand complex problems, develop solutions for them, and create the insight that allows policy makers to create policy and also asset operators and owners to invest and operate their organizations.
[00:03:15] Piers Clark: Excellent. So, what we've got in UKWIR is a research body that undertakes defensive research on behalf of the sector, in particular the sector for the UK but we'll be talking a bit about the international aspects a bit later in this conversation. So, it's funded by the water companies, and I'm not after the precise amount of funding, but broadly, what sort of ranges is it?
[00:03:38] Mike Rose: We deliver multimillion pound research programs on an annual basis both collaboratively through our one voice program of research, but then also specifically working with those members to help them deliver some of their regulatory obligations.
[00:03:52] Piers Clark: If I'm a water company, I've got a specific problem, but I know 17 of the other water companies around me have got the same problem. It'll be somewhat foolish to just tackle that problem on my own and have 17 different people spending 17 different budgets solving the same problem.
[00:04:07] Piers Clark: Now, walk me through some of the successes and projects that you've been through and maybe some of the failures. I don't know if there are any. Walk me through some of the examples of the things that UKWIR has done.
[00:04:17] Mike Rose: As a result of our 30 years of research, we created a huge wealth of information. Recently one of our successes has been to launch AI search capability over the top of that, allowing our members to interrogate that wealth of information to understand and develop answers for some of the problems that they face today. It was one of the criticisms and challenges, of our kind of legacy data sets that they were a little bit impenetrable and AI really has helped us unlock the potential and the power of the work that we've done over those years.
[00:04:50] Piers Clark: Yeah, you say it's a criticism, but let's be fair. UKWIR has been around for 30 years. You've been generating some world-leading science which is written not surprisingly in the 1990s in physical reports that people got. There wasn't such a thing as the internet back then.
[00:05:05] Piers Clark: So, digitizing that learning so that your members and people in the sector can then access it using modern day tools, it's a bit unfair to call it a criticism of the past because it didn't exist.
[00:05:15] Mike Rose: That's fair enough, yeah, but I think one of the things that perhaps people, understand even who are familiar with UKWIR won't necessarily recognize us for is some of the portfolio of products, tools and services that we deliver for members that help our clients every part of the water cycle work efficiently, work effectively, work collaboratively on common challenges.
[00:05:39] Piers Clark: You've mentioned these tools that you've created. And if I'm a utility, what's this tool that I'm using? How does it help my business?
[00:05:45] Mike Rose: One would be “Red-Up” that helps people understand how the future rainfall patterns will affect sewage systems. Flooding costs the UK somewhere in the order of 2 billion pounds per annum, big problem not just for water companies, but also local authorities, landowners. And by enabling organizations to understand future scenarios, they can obviously look at kind of the infrastructure needs, the investment decisions, how to create interventions more sustainably, and work again collaboratively because rainfall is not just a water company challenge. It is a consumer challenge. It is a landowner challenge. It is an industry challenge.
[00:06:26] Piers Clark: So, this is a tool that the industry recognized they needed. They gave you the exam question of we need someone to develop a tool that will solve this problem. UKWIR then went away, worked with a whole array of contractors and academics to generate this tool that now exists for the members to use. So did the members pay a fee to use that tool, or do they now have access to it because they paid for it upfront. Does it come as part of their wider membership?
[00:06:49] Mike Rose: it absolutely comes as part of their wider membership, yes, as do all of the tools and services that we provide. A number of them are available just by simply registering your details and logging onto the website. Some of them we do control access to, but all UKWIR members get access to our full suite of products and services.
[00:07:11] Piers Clark: Excellent. Alright, you said you were going to give me a couple of case studies. Give me the second one.
[00:07:15] Mike Rose: Something I guess front of mind for many people at the moment is water quality monitoring and pollution control. It's a matter that is often in the UK media, and our Source Apportionment and Geographical Information System or also known as “SAGIS”, enables the integration of multiple models to build a clear picture at catchment level of where sources of pollution are coming from, what the impact on the environment is and what the options and requirements for interventions might be.
[00:07:47] Mike Rose: It enables regulators, landowners and water companies to come together to understand their own contributions to that kind of aquatic picture. And ensure that there is a plan in place for water quality in the future, compliance and control. I think that it's only by working together that we are really ultimately gonna get the river quality that we all want and need.
[00:08:10] Piers Clark: All right, so you've done a water quality, you've done a drainage one. Part of the reason I was so confident in asking you to give a second case study was because when I was working for a water utility, the one that everyone always said was just spectacular world class was actually the carbon accounting tool.
[00:08:24] Piers Clark: Can you give me 30 seconds on the carbon accounting tool?
[00:08:27] Mike Rose: Our carbon accounting workbook was developed in response to water companies needing to deliver a whole suite of reporting around carbon. Be that through climate change disclosure task force or the streamlined energy and carbon reporting regulations.
[00:08:45] Mike Rose: This is a standardized product developed in 2007, updated annually to reflect the latest best practice and science in measuring and accounting for carbon. So, what gets measured can get managed. And ultimately what it allows our members to do is create efficient and consistent estimates of their carbon emissions across the sector and the supply chain.
[00:09:09] Piers Clark: That's the key point for something like carbon accounting, you need to be able to make sure that you've got comparators that stand out to robust examination, and we actually probably need to get to those comparators that can be taken across international boundaries so that you can then say, well, so and so's doing this in the Netherlands and they're doing this in Canada, but just before we get there.
[00:09:27] Piers Clark: Everything UKWIR does is around collaboration and innovation, but there's a downside to collaboration. You slow things down, you lose some of the sharp edge of innovation. How do you balance that bit of the moment you collaborate, you create some dynamic that makes it just different from every utility just wanting to plow its own fire on its own?
[00:09:45] Mike Rose: For me, one of the best examples of our collaboration will be our leakage network. They are engaged across the sector, across all stakeholders in understanding the dynamics of best practice, of performance. The importance of sharing information in a space where there really is very little competitive advantage is for me hugely important. And ultimately it's about the way those people engage and the passion that they bring to working with UKWIR is invaluable in and of itself.
[00:10:16] Piers Clark: Good answer. I like that. You're called UKWIR and the UK in UKWIR, the U and the K stands for the United Kingdom. Is this a parochial, we just do it in the UK and if you're outside the UK, screw you, we're not interested? Or do you have strong international links?
[00:10:31] Mike Rose: Absolutely strong international links, both with the supply chain partners that we deliver with who obviously are quite often global organizations, but also, one of our roles on behalf of our members is to represent them through the Global Water Research Coalition, which includes members from Singapore, Australia, Europe, and North America. Really to ensure that we share best practice, we leverage what we know in the UK, with our partners overseas, but equally, we're able to bring what they've understood overseas, back into the UK to accelerate, the understanding of some of the emerging science for our members.
[00:11:09] Piers Clark: Okay, so if I'm an Australian utility, and I'm listening to this now and I think blimey, I'd love to know more about the carbon accounting tool, what do I do? Do I drop you an email?
[00:11:18] Mike Rose: Yes, we are always open to talking with potential collaborators and partners. For me, my career has been built on partnership. It's been built on collaboration and, I think the more that we share with one another, the faster we move forward together.
[00:11:34] Mike Rose: I'm reminded of the African proverb, if you wanna go fast, go alone. If you wanna go far, go together, so let's go together.
[00:11:43] Piers Clark: Brilliant, I like that. Now, we always finish with a bit of a personal question. Let's go back three decades to a young Mike Rose. What advice would you give him?
[00:11:51] Mike Rose: Probably about a third of the way through my career, I learned about my own personal strengths, but then also when you overplay your strengths, they can become weaknesses. So, my advice to my younger self would be to identify and learn your personal strengths sooner rather than later and then learn how to use them to great effect, but also manage and control them because they can be part of the reason that it can be difficult to get stuff done.
[00:12:18] Piers Clark: Excellent. You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark, and my guest today has been Mike Rose, Chief Executive of UK Water Industry Research, UKWIR, and we've been talking about collaboration in innovation. I hope you can join us next time. Thank you.