Future Water
By AquaLAB
Future WaterSep 09, 2020
Stretching Your Innovation Dollar Series: Creating and Navigating Partnerships to Accelerate Innovation with Nick Shewring
While each innovation approach has some overlap and similarities, it’s the nuances that make them distinct. Partnerships can have a wide range of impacts for corporations and water utilities alike; they can enhance technological capability, supply chain flow and a range of other things.
In this episode, we talk partnerships with Nick Shewring, Strategy and Client Lead for GHD Digital.
This is the third episode in a series on Stretching Your Innovation Dollar, where we explore how water utilities can partner with, co-create with and empower innovators both from within their organisations and externally.
Nick takes us through best practices for forming partnerships whether you’re a large organisation, startup, or individual and also explains the massive value partnerships bring to the water industry by helping us work better together.
About Nick
Nick is the Strategy and Innovation Lead for D-Lab at GHD and one of our awesome team members here at AquaLAB. In his past business life, he worked with Air New Zealand and also co-founded successful New Zealand startup BizDojo as well as other startups. Nick has coached and mentored hundreds of startup teams and has a significant network in the local and international startup ecosystem. His specialty is bringing people together to achieve impressive things.
Connect with Nick Shewring on LinkedIn
For show notes on all of our episodes, visit the AquaLAB website.
Stretching Your Innovation Dollar Series: How intrapreneurship is changing the game in corporate culture with Melissa Witheriff
Being entrepreneurial no longer means having to leave the corporate life behind. It can be done with the backing of an organisation. Organisations know that in order to survive they need to innovate and more and more organisations are recognising the benefits of fostering intrapreneurship to this end. It’s a win win. Organisations take on the risk and the rewards and employees get to play in the innovation sandpit and shift the dial on what’s possible with support.
In this episode, we talk intrapreneurship with Melissa Witheriff, Head of Digital Innovation at Credit Union Australia (CUA).
This is the second episode in a series on Stretching Your Innovation Dollar, where we explore how water utilities can partner with, co-create with and empower innovators both from within their organisations and externally.
While not from a water utility, Melissa lays out the steps to create a culture of innovation in large highly-regulated organisations, as well as what it takes for entrepreneurial individuals in the corporate landscape to go the distance. Regardless of what side of the fence you’re on, this episode has tons of value for any entrepreneur or organisation looking to transform how innovation is done from within.
For show notes on all of our episodes, visit: https://medium.com/@aquaLAB.
Cyber attacks on water utilities: why and how to mitigate the risks with Sunil Sharma
Cyber attacks are a clear and present threat to both organisations and individuals the world over and, alarmingly, they are no longer just about stealing your bank details.
As a recent attack on an Israeli water treatment plant has shown, the motivations behind them are becoming increasingly political and that poses a significant issue for water infrastructure.
We talked with Cyber Security expert, GHD’s Sunil Sharma about the impact cyber threats could have on water and what utilities can do to safeguard their data and operational technology.
About Sunil
Sunil Sharma has 25+ years of experience in Digital Risk and Security, and ICT. Formerly, he lead Digital Risk and Cyber Security practices at PwC and Accenture. He has led several Digital Risk advisory and consulting engagements across Energy, Resources, Financial, Retail, and Entertainment industries. And is currently GHD’s lead consultant, assisting organisations in setting up comprehensive digital risk strategies and executing successful rollout of risk controls. Sunil is passionate about cyber security, especially in the water industry where there’s more take up of operational technology, particularly in the wake of COVID-19.
Stretching Your Innovation Dollar Series: How Open Innovation Unearths Corporate Potential
What does innovation look like in the corporate context in 2020? And how can utilities leverage their people, their partners and smaller players in the startup ecosystem to create value for their customers?
This is the first episode in a series on Stretching Your Innovation Dollar, where we explore how water utilities can partner with, co-create with and empower innovators both from within their organisations and externally.
In this episode, we talk about open innovation with David Camerlengo, Principal of Open Innovation at Unearthed. Unearthed is an Australian-based technology and innovation services platform that connects challenges facing the resources sector to a community of entrepreneurs and industry innovators.
David shares some excellent insights with us on what open innovation is, how it’s implemented and what good looks like. He also demonstrates how this approach has helped solve big business challenges through external collaboration and finding potential in unlikely spaces.
About David
David has a passion for matching large resource sector corporates with small startups and scale-ups from around the world. What he’s found is that sometimes the best solutions come from surprising places and ideas, and that’s the beauty of open innovation.
David’s experience is largely based in technology commercialization and senior stakeholder engagement, with a background as an engineer. Previously he served as Trade & Investment Commissioner for Queensland Government and was based in Houston, Texas.
David is a board member of both the Open World Wide Innovation Network, and the Australian - American Chamber of Commerce and is the former President of EGR Group.
Water industry supply chain resiliency in the aftermath of COVID-19
Delays, shortages and businesses going bust: Welcome to supply during the 2020 pandemic. Covid-19 has exposed some gaping holes in industry supply chains. A recent article in Supply Chain Digital claimed that “94% of Fortune 1000 companies have been affected by supply chain disruption” because of Covid-19.
Utilities are suddenly faced with the reality that any disruption to the delicate procurement process can have a massive ripple effect on the provision of safe, clean water to customers at the end of that supply chain. And, in this episode, we explore how supply chain issues are impacting on the water industry and ask, what will enable utilities to create a resilient water supply chain in the years to come.
To take us further into this topic, we talked to 4 incredible experts in the water industry: Jacob Wu from Unitywater, Simon Kaye and Meha Bola from GHD in North America and Katrina Donaghy from water tech company Water Ledger.
To read the show notes and our in-depth article on the water industry supply chain, visit our blog on Medium.
Drones, Remote Working and Digital Twins: Water Innovation in a Time of COVID-19 feat. Rohan Koenig
Covid-19 has accelerated innovation in the water industry and one innovation that is attracting increased attention from utilities is remote assessment technology. In this episode, AquaLAB's Cara McCullough talks to Rohan Koenig, Immersive Digital Solutions Lead at GHD Digital about drones, thermal imaging, worker safety, digital twins and more. Rohan dives deep into how Pandemic life has accelerated the uptake of this technology and how it can be applied in the water industry.
About Rohan
With the benefit of over 20 years of experience working within science and engineering combined with management experience, Rohan's expertise is in the understanding and development of business opportunities, team leadership and external relationships to achieve success.
Connect with Rohan on LinkedIn
About AquaLAB
AquaLAB is GHD’s global knowledge and innovation platform for the water industry. We seed and grow the conversations, ideas and innovations to solve your water imperatives.
Website: http://aqualab.ghd.com