From Railways to Radical Innovation: How Northumbrian Water Turned a Festival into a Strategy Engine
Executive Exchange — Episode Feature with Heidi Mottram, Chief Executive, Northumbrian Water
In this episode of the Exec Exchange, Dr. Piers Clark sits down with Heidi Mottram, Chief Executive of Northumbrian Water, to explore one of the most distinctive fixtures in the global water calendar: the Northumbrian Water Innovation Festival.
What starts as a conversation about an “event” quickly becomes something more interesting: a look at how a regulated utility has turned a festival format into a strategic engine for innovation, collaboration, and sector-wide change.
A CEO Who Didn’t Grow Up in Water
Heidi’s path to the water sector is not the typical engineering-by-rote story.
Before joining Northumbrian Water in 2010, she spent nearly 25 years in the railway industry, ending as Managing Director of Northern Rail, responsible for around 2,500 train services a day. It’s a background steeped in operational complexity, safety-critical systems and very public accountability.
When she moved into water, she became—at the time—the first female CEO of a UK water company. Over a decade later, she’s still in post, and the landscape looks markedly different: a far more diverse group of leaders and a sector increasingly aware that it must innovate, not just operate.
Northumbrian Water today:
- Operates as one of the UK’s regional privatised water and wastewater companies
- Provides water and wastewater services in the North East of England
- Runs Essex & Suffolk Water in the South East as a water-only supplier
- Serves around 4.5 million customers, roughly two-thirds in the North East and one-third in the South East
That scale makes the Innovation Festival more than a nice-to-have. It makes it a live experiment in how a large, regulated utility can rewire how it thinks and collaborates.
Innovation Festival: Glastonbury Meets Strategy
The Innovation Festival didn’t emerge from a formal consultancy exercise. It started, as Heidi tells it, in a taxi on the way to a staff Christmas party.
Northumbrian Water already had innovation “in the DNA”:
- No standalone innovation silo
- A belief that innovation is everybody’s business
- Strong partnerships with technology, consulting and delivery organisations
The question was how to accelerate that energy.
Nigel Watson, Northumbrian Water’s CIO, floated the idea: take everything they were already doing with partners and mash it together with a British summer music festival. Think Glastonbury, but instead of muddy fields and headliners, you get sprints, hackathons and cross-sector problem-solving. Heidi’s reaction: slightly mad, clearly brilliant.
The result is the Innovation Festival, first run in 2017 and now a core part of the water sector calendar.
What it looks like in practice:
- Multi-day, week-long format, hosted off-site at a racecourse
- Tents dedicated to different themes and problem statements
- Design sprints and hackathons tackling specific water, data, climate and customer challenges
- Street food, music, TED-style talks and informal networking to keep creativity high
- A deliberately designed environment where people are relaxed, curious and willing to challenge default thinking
The scale-up has been rapid:
- The first festival hosted 6 sprints and 4 hackathons
- The most recent edition ran around 50 sprints and 10–11 hackathons
- Around 3,000 collaborators now take part each year
- Participants come from around 33 countries, spanning utilities, technology firms, regulators, SMEs and academia
This is no longer “a Northumbrian Water event”. It’s a platform.
A Poster Child for Impact: Mapping the Underground
Innovation festivals live or die by outcomes. Heidi doesn’t hesitate when asked for a flagship example.
One of the earliest sprints tackled a problem every infrastructure operator knows too well:
“We don’t really know what’s under our feet.”
Every utility holds its own asset maps—often in GIS, sometimes still on paper. What they weren’t doing was sharing them effectively. Legal concerns, data security, commercial sensitivity and misaligned systems all got in the way.
At the first Innovation Festival in 2017, Northumbrian Water put:
- Multiple utilities in the same tent
- Their lawyers in the same tent
- The Ordnance Survey, the UK’s national mapping agency, in the same tent
The brief was simple and ambitious: create a practical way to see all underground assets in one place, safely.
The breakthrough was a tool that:
- Pulls data from multiple asset owners into a single usable view
- Allows planners and contractors to see what’s where, when they need it
- Then removes access after the work is complete – the “Snapchat for asset maps” approach
The journey from there:
- First, a small section of the racecourse was mapped.
- Then the city of Sunderland.
- Then the wider North East.
- The approach was handed to government and developed into a national underground asset mapping platform.
It now includes data from gas, electricity, telecoms and water, and is being promoted as a pan-sector planning and safety tool. The estimated economic benefit? Around £1.5 billion.
That is what it looks like when a festival moves from good vibes to hard, measurable value.
Building a Pipeline of Ideas – and the Future Workforce
The Underground Mapping project is one story in what Heidi describes as a multi-million-pound pipeline of ideasemerging from the festival.
Equally important is the parallel festival running alongside it: a STEM-focused programme for young people.
- Around 1,000 school pupils take part each year, both on-site and online
- The aim is explicit: to expose young people to STEM careers in water, technology and infrastructure
- It positions water not as a legacy sector, but as a mission-driven, innovation-rich place to build a career
In other words, the festival isn’t just generating pilots and prototypes; it’s cultivating the talent pipeline the sector is going to need.
Open Innovation, Shared Platform
One of the striking features of the Innovation Festival is how deliberately open it is.
Despite operating in a privatised water market, Northumbrian Water made a decision early on:
- The festival would be open to all UK water companies
- Other utilities and sectors would be invited in
- Global technology companies—from hyperscalers to specialist software providers—would be core partners
- The philosophy would be open innovation and open data, not proprietary advantage
The model has started to replicate:
- Sydney Water has run its own innovation festival, inspired by the Northumbrian approach
- There have been discussions about similar models in North America
- Large technology companies now see the festival as a valuable testbed and convening point
Northumbrian Water has, intentionally or not, positioned itself as a host and facilitator of a wider ecosystem, rather than simply a beneficiary.
Leadership Lessons: Be Worth Working For
The conversation closes on a personal note, with Heidi reflecting on the advice that has stayed with her.
From her father, a hard-working Yorkshireman:
“If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.”
That ethic underpins her approach to both operations and innovation: commit fully, execute properly, don’t do anything halfway.
From early career mentors, she learned something else:
People work for people, not organisations.
Her leadership philosophy follows from that:
- People are motivated by their boss and their colleagues, not the logo on the building
- As a leader, you have to be “worth working for”
- Culture, innovation and delivery flow from how people feel about the humans they report to
That mix of graft, openness and people-centric leadership is woven directly into the Innovation Festival model.
Why This Matters for Water Sector Leaders
For B2B audiences across the water sector, Northumbrian Water’s Innovation Festival isn’t just an interesting story; it raises some pointed questions:
- How are you structuring innovation so it’s everyone’s business, not a side project?
- Where are you creating neutral spaces where competitors, regulators, tech firms and communities can co-create solutions?
- Are you treating innovation as an event, or as a repeatable engine that drives strategy, partnerships and culture?
- And perhaps most importantly: are you, as a leader, someone people feel is worth working for?
To hear the full conversation with Heidi Mottram and to dive deeper into how the Innovation Festival operates behind the scenes, listen to this episode of the Exec Exchange.