Pete Vale (LinkedIn) is Carbon & Circular Economy Architect at Severn Trent Water. I was very keen to get his perspective for 3 reasons:
1. Severn Trent is a utility with responsibility for a key natural resource cycle (water).
2. It is heavily regulated, which sets (as you will hear) important context for any innovation effort.
3. The role of innovation architect was new to me, and I wanted to know what it meant.
We had a very rich conversation, and I learnt a lot.
This is part of a series of interviews about innovation for sustainability conducted for the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources, as a contribution to a module in this Masters. You can find out more about these interviews, and the module, here.
SOME KEY POINTS
Role of 'innovation architect'. Innovation architects are there to design the innovation programme, starting a tthe fuzzy front-end of the innovation process. -They scout the world for for new technologies, new developments, seeing how they line up against the organisation's innovation needs in the short-, medium- and long-term.
-They structure an on-going innovation programme.
-Once the innovation projects that have been validated, tested and very importantly funded, then handed over to the innovation delivery teams to actually run the projects.
Net Zero goal is very useful. Peter says, “I've been working in innovation for sort of, for 20 years, in the water in industry, and a lot of the innovation, if I reflect back has been that incremental, you know, finding more efficient ways saving on chemical and energy. But but but absolutely just, you know, just small, incremental improvements, this is completely different. This is about, you know, paradigm shifts, really doing something very different. And therefore, you know, taking on much more risk.” (Transcription by Otter.)
In Pete's telling, this has shifted the companies, their trade body and also the regulator.
QUESTION TIMINGS
Normally I would put the timings of each question (see list here). But our conversation ranged widely, and not in a linear way. All the questions are answered, just not in an order which makes it useful to highlight them here!
This is part of a series of interviews about innovation for sustainability conducted for the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources, as a contribution to a module in this Masters. You can find out more about these interviews, and the module, here.
