Innovation Delivery Manager

Team: Intelligence Team

Location: Hybrid / Flexible (UK)

Salary: £55,000, Permanent

About the Organisation

Spring is the open-innovation hub for the UK and Irish water sector. We work at the centre of a rapidly changing industry shaped by climate change, growing populations, ageing infrastructure and increasing public scrutiny.

• Our vision is to become global leaders in open innovation.
• Our mission is to attract, connect and support the brightest thinkers, both within and beyond the sector, so that transformation can happen more quickly.
• Our objective is to centralise innovation intelligence for the UK water sector.

In practice, we:

• Act as the front door to the UK and Irish water industry, giving companies and suppliers immediate insight into who is doing what, what is working and where the next breakthrough may arise.
• Broker partnerships, share lessons learnt and remove duplication so that ideas move from concept to deployment at pace.
• Give water companies the time and headspace to innovate by curating intelligence, building networks and highlighting opportunities.
• Help the sector respond to its toughest challenges, ensuring resilient, sustainable water services for customers, communities and the environment.

The Role

The Innovation Delivery Manager is responsible for gathering innovation intelligence and presenting it through three of Spring's core services: brokerage, fact finding and sector coordination.

Water company innovation priorities are captured and maintained by the wider team. This role works from that foundation, identifying intelligence that matches those priorities and delivering it through the appropriate service. The role does not set priorities. It responds to them.

The post holder will have a solid working knowledge of water company operational processes, sufficient to assess whether an innovation solution is credible and applicable in a utility environment. They will be a confident communicator, able to present findings clearly to technical and non-technical audiences alike and will attend sector events to identify developments that strengthen the intelligence picture. Every output should be clear, well-structured and immediately useful to the water companies receiving it.

The post holder will work as an integrated part of the Intelligence Team, sharing findings openly and contributing to the team's collective knowledge base.

Our Services

The responsibilities of this role are structured around Spring's three core services.

Brokerage

Brokerage involves making targeted, informed introductions between water companies and the innovators best placed to help them. Spring's responsibility is to identify the right match and make the connection. The post holder must have sufficient technical understanding to ensure each introduction is well-judged and clearly communicated.

Fact Finding

Fact finding involves researching a specific innovation challenge on behalf of a water company, gathering information from Spring's intelligence base to assess what has been tried across the sector, what has worked and what has not, and presenting findings in a format the company can act upon. The output may inform a trial, a procurement decision or internal planning.

Sector Coordination

Sector coordination brings water companies together around sector wide challenges such as PFAS, enabling collective learning and reducing duplication. The post holder supports and delivers coordination activities, ensures the intelligence underpinning them is accurate and current, and presents findings clearly to the companies involved.

Key Responsibilities

Intelligence Gathering

• Gather innovation intelligence matched to the priorities of each subscribing water company, using the knowledge base already held by the team as the starting point.
• Attend sector events and industry gatherings to identify emerging developments and relevant activity that strengthens the intelligence picture.
• Maintain a current understanding of what has been tried across the sector, what worked and what did not, so that intelligence presented to companies is grounded in evidence.

Brokerage

• Identify relevant technologies, solutions and expertise matched to each water company's innovation priorities and present these through Spring's brokerage service.
• Make targeted introductions between water companies and the innovators best placed to help them.
• Ensure each introduction is clearly communicated and properly handed over. Spring's responsibility ends at the quality of the connection.

Fact Finding

• Lead fact finding activity on behalf of water companies, researching specific innovation challenges and technology areas to a depth that produces actionable intelligence.
• Assess what the market offers in response to a given challenge, filtering for relevance and practical applicability in a utility environment.
• Present findings in clear, well-structured reports and briefings that are immediately useful to the stakeholders receiving them.

Sector Coordination

• Support and deliver sector coordination activities that bring water companies together around shared innovation challenges.
• Ensure the intelligence underpinning coordination activities is accurate, current and relevant to the companies involved.
• Present findings and intelligence clearly within coordination settings, to individual companies and to wider groups of industry participants.

Communication and Reporting

• Produce clear, well-structured reports and briefings that translate technical and market intelligence into outputs stakeholders can understand and act upon.
• Present findings confidently to a range of audiences, from individual water company contacts to larger industry gatherings.

Team Contribution

• Share intelligence gathered through research, events and engagement promptly with the wider team.
• Contribute to the team's collective knowledge base, ensuring findings are accessible to colleagues and inform wider intelligence activity.

Skills

• Process knowledge: A working understanding of water or wastewater systems, sufficient to assess whether an innovation solution is credible and applicable in a utility environment.
• Evidence assessment: Able to evaluate the credibility and relevance of a technology, trial result or market claim and form a clear, well-reasoned view on its applicability to a water company's specific context.
• Intelligence gathering: Able to identify and synthesise relevant intelligence from across the sector and wider market, filtering for what is useful and applicable.
• Technical translation: Able to take complex technical or academic content and present it in terms that are meaningful to a non-specialist audience.
• Report writing: Produces well-structured, clearly written outputs that are concise and straightforward to act upon.
• Presentation: Confident presenting to varied audiences, with the ability to make complex ideas clear and compelling.
• Stakeholder engagement: Confident in conversations with technical experts, able to ask the right questions and build trusted working relationships.
• Independent awareness: Identifies relevant developments across the sector and brings them into the team's intelligence picture without direction.
• Team contribution: Works as part of a shared intelligence effort, making findings accessible to colleagues and building on the work of others.

Experience

• Experience working within the water or wastewater sector in a process, technical, operations or applied research and development capacity.
• Familiarity with how innovation is evaluated, trialled and adopted in a utility context.
• Experience producing technical reports or briefings for a non-specialist audience.
• Experience presenting findings or recommendations to professional audiences.
• A track record of delivering against targets or value metrics in a client-facing or stakeholder-driven role.
• Experience working across organisational boundaries with suppliers, consultants, academia or other utilities is an advantage.

Requirements

• Legal right to work in the United Kingdom.
• Willingness and ability to travel within the UK and Ireland for sector events, team sessions and stakeholder meetings.

Benefits

• Innovative, purpose driven environment at the heart of water sector transformation.
• Hybrid working model with a high level of trust and autonomy.
• Comprehensive private health insurance and well-being support.
• Pension scheme with 3% employee and 6% employer contributions.
• 27 days of annual leave plus bank holidays.
• Life assurance at three times salary.
• Professional development and 3 paid volunteering days each year.
• Competitive salary