A festival of inclusive innovation

Have you heard of inclusive innovation? You have now. Innovation can often exclude people; as a result, businesses move slower or miss out on great ideas. But we believe nobody needs to be left out. Which is why, this month, we begin the journey of imagining how to include everyone in innovation.

The September 30th launch of our new report Innovation for everyone will be followed on October 18th by an innovation sprint we’re holding as part of the Northumbrian Water Innovation Festival 2021 (see below).

To help ensure everyone can be an innovator, our sprint will focus on ‘quiet innovation’, or how to give a voice to innovative introverts. Quiet innovation overcomes just one of the many barriers to inclusive innovation – you can see the others illustrated in the diagram below – but it is an essential part of the solution.

You are very welcome to join us at our sprint, and experience the wider Festival, by signing up here: www.innovationfestival.org/register/

About the Festival

The annual Innovation Festival from Northumbrian Water is (in its own words) “a big, loud, exciting and very unique event, where we gather some of the greatest and most innovative minds from the worlds of business, science, tech, engineering, utilities and customer services, and get them to tackle real-world problems together in a series of sprints. Like Glastonbury meets Bake off but without the rain and with more engineers!”

The four-day event will see thousands of the most creative minds from all over the world come together in a series of design sprints, hacks, workshops and activities, aimed at solving big challenges such as Net Zero carbon, sustainability, world water poverty and breaking down the digital divide.

In 2019, the Festival attracted 1800 young people from local schools, colleges and universities, and 665 local businesses and organisations. Media coverage of the event reached more than 127 million people all over the world.

We’re delighted to be hosting a sprint session as part of the 2021 Festival, and we hope to see you there.