The Isle Connect event gathered a truly global audience, creating a perfect environment for collaboration and innovation. With over a hundred delegates joining from 60+ organisations across the globe, the event provided a unique platform to explore diverse perspectives and exchange insights as to how innovation will enable us to meet the existential environmental and societal challenges we face, now and in the years to come. Participants engaged in dynamic discussions, exploring new concepts like the Water Environmental Transition and inspiring future-focused solutions for the water sector.

The Water Environmental Transition calls for a holistic and collaborative approach to managing water sustainably. By balancing environmental, social and economic priorities, it seeks to revolutionise water management through innovation, policy evolution, and collective action. At Isle, we are proud to lead and advocate for this global transition, helping organisations thrive and bring forward impactful changes that address today’s most pressing water challenges.

During this event, thought leaders, innovators, and industry stakeholders came together to tackle the key questions shaping the future of water management. Here’s a snapshot of the sessions that inspired thought, and discussions this webpage holds space for the actions taken from it.

Ian McAulay and Oliver Raud guided us through a thought-provoking exploration of utopian and dystopian possibilities for the water industry. Discussions spanned wastewater, water resources, pollution, and circularity, examining the opportunities and challenges to achieve—or avoid—these futures. To enable the Water Environmental Transition we need leadership not just from the top – we invited/urged those who attended Connect to be more radical in their approach to innovation and be part of a movement that guides others to adopt and scale transformational innovation, at all levels of their organisations.

Stay tuned for session outputs, including the use of Cards for Humanity, available soon on this website.

Piers Clark hosted a session where a range of forward-thinking speakers bravely shared real-life stories and case studies, prompting reflection on how we, as an innovation community, might respond to similar challenges. Despite a strong culture of learning from our own mistakes, the session highlighted the need for the sector to improve the way in which we learn from each other.

Key takeaway: “Corporate memory waxes and wanes.” Organizations must strengthen long-term knowledge retention while addressing optimism bias when learning from peers. Isle can assist with innovation maturity and company needs assessments to help embed these learnings into corporate culture.

This session brought together water and technology companies to discuss their innovation journeys.

• Nele Philips and Dr. Shahir Shakori highlighted the role of innovation centres and funding mechanisms to incubate new innovative ideas and start-ups and to embed innovation, at scale, within an organisation.
• Oliver Lawal, Paige Peters, and Rob Passmore shared their experiences in navigating the complexities of introducing technology to the water sector.

“Coalition of the Willing”: Attendees were encouraged to persist with complex challenges, as this determination drives meaningful industry change for future generations.

In this “intergalactic interlude”, nine technology entrants to the 1.2 million pound Aqualunar challenge fund shared insights around designing innovative solutions for use on the moon. This is a UK initiative, funded by the UK Space Agency and delivered by Challenge Works in partnership with Isle and Exotopic, focusing on water purification technologies for space exploration, with potential applications on Earth. These groundbreaking technologies offer fresh perspectives for tackling global water challenges and allow us to break away from more traditional thinking, reimagining the way we treat water in terrestrial systems, by looking at lunar innovations.

Shifting the focus from solutions to problems, this session encouraged participants to unpack challenges before seeking solutions. Through activities like problem identification, challenge framing and prioritization, attendees identified critical sector challenges, enabling the innovation community to be more targeted and design more effective solutions – designing the right things by designing things right!

The final session explored ways to bridge the gaps in the innovation journey. Attendees collaborated to address challenges identified in earlier sessions, focusing on mechanisms to support innovators and entrepreneurs in bringing impactful solutions to market.

Key takeaway: Collaboration and Communication. As an industry we need to work together to support each other through mechanisms such as champions, collaborative trials and long term partnerships between innovators and utilities to elicit change.

This event underscored the importance of collective action, forward-thinking innovation, and practical solutions in driving the Water Environmental Transition.

Stay tuned for more outcomes here.