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Welcome to The Executive Exchange, a premier podcast series for on-the-go senior executives. Each episode features short, impactful podcasts where industry leaders share key insights and experiences from the water industry.
[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15-minute podcast in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, inform, and educate other water sector leaders from around the globe.
[00:00:10] Piers Clark: My name is Piers Clark, and my guest today is Dr. Jo Burgess, Chief Executive for the Tech Ascend Foundation. And we're gonna be talking about "Pilot Heaven", which sounds like a glorious thing to discuss.
[00:00:22] Piers Clark: Jo, brilliant to have you with us today.
[00:00:24] Jo Burgess: Piers, thank you very much for having me. Happy to be here.
[00:00:27] Piers Clark: We always like to know a little bit about our speakers. So give me the potted history. How did you get into the role that you're in now?
[00:00:35] Jo Burgess: Entirely by accident. So I came into the water industry from a bit of an activist background, and having waved a placard a few times about pollution, realized that the way to get people to change wasn't to tell them they were doing it all wrong, but to tell them how better to do it right.
[00:00:49] Jo Burgess: And from there, I got into my first taste of research in action, which was a PhD with Yorkshire Water in the UK. I looked at ways to create biological systems that break down antibiotics waste, which is somewhat counterintuitive, to fix pollution issues in a river near Huddersfield, up in the north of England.
[00:01:07] Jo Burgess: By the time I'd finished trying something at bench scale, choosing what worked, doing a pilot plant, having it implemented, came back a couple of years later, the river had gone from a dead zone to full of life- of plants and fish and birds and frogs. I would love to say it's all because of me, but actually- ... I was one small piece in a much bigger plan that Yorkshire Water had, but it still gave me my home in research for the good of society and the environment.
[00:01:34] Piers Clark: I think in the water sector, we are all one small piece of a much bigger plan. I've known you for many years, and I hadn't known you were a feisty, demonstrating student at one stage. Now, you've also spent a lot of your life overseas. Tell me about that.
[00:01:48] Jo Burgess: I have. I spent 23 years of my 25 years in the working industry in South Africa. I left straight after graduating with my PhD from Cranfield University. I was a lecturer in environmental biotechnology at Rhodes University down in the Eastern Cape Province.
[00:02:04] Jo Burgess: And from that, I've spent eight years in academia, and then 10 years in the South African government. And there, I worked for the Water Research Commission, a funding body dedicated to anything to do with water, multidisciplinary, very pragmatic. I think unique in the world, and was responsible for writing the National Water Research, Development, and Innovation Strategy 2015-2025.
[00:02:27] Piers Clark: Excellent. All right. Now, let's talk about the Tech Ascend Foundation, 'cause this is a new not-for-profit that's doing great things across the water sector. So, tell me the story about the Tech Ascend Foundation.
[00:02:40] Jo Burgess: The Foundation itself is just over a year old. It's a very young nonprofit. The things it does, though, primarily the Trial Reservoirs Initiative, are four years old and this is because the Foundation is the sister not-for-profit of the Isle Group.
[00:02:54] Jo Burgess: The Trial Reservoirs Initiative is an evergreen revolving fund model. We lower the financial barriers by providing repayable grants to technology developers that de-risks full-scale trials of proven but unfamiliar technologies.
[00:03:10] Jo Burgess: So we'll pay the tech vendors to deliver a proof of value demonstration in an end user's actual asset base on the contractual obligation that if the trial fails, we take the hit and write the money off, but if it succeeds, then the end user, the utility, moves forward with procuring that technology, and the vendor then puts the money back into the Reservoir to fund the next innovator. So, it's an evergreen recyclable pot of money.
[00:03:36] Jo Burgess: The first Trial Reservoir, the Climate Change Trial Reservoir, was set up as an anger response to COP that took place in Glasgow. And at the very end of COP, the resolution was weakened considerably in the very last round of discussion.
[00:03:50] Jo Burgess: We were all very angry and decided someone should do something and saw that we are somebody, and we would do something. So the Isle Group put the seed funding in to create the first Trial Reservoir.
[00:04:01] Piers Clark: It's a brilliant idea of removing the financial risk associated with trials from utilities who've got other things to spend their money on, yet adding in that, well, let's think about what makes a trial successful.
[00:04:14] Piers Clark: Because if it's a success, let's roll it out because only by adopting new technology are we going to address some of the climate crisis challenges that we face.
[00:04:23] Jo Burgess: Yeah. There's a trial and purchase agreement, or TNPA, before the trial even begins. Both parties have to legally agree on some objective success criteria and the metrics by which they're measured, the KPIs.
[00:04:35] Jo Burgess: So if they're met, the end user has signed a contract that guarantees they'll procure the solution.
[00:04:41] Piers Clark: Brilliant. Now, you were in Madrid in May at the Global Water Summit, and one of the things you were talking about was Pilot Heaven, which I think aligns with the experience you've had with the Trial Reservoirs.
[00:04:53] Piers Clark: Tell me about what is Pilot Heaven?
[00:04:56] Jo Burgess: You may remember the Cunliffe Report came out, for those outside the UK, there was a government independent commission that looked at the state of the water industry. John Cunliffe used the phrase "pilot purgatory", and he spoke about the "hell of the innovation chasm, the piloting valley of death" that innovators often fall into in the water sector because of the extent to which the industry is compliance heavy, highly regulated, and the very long sale cycles that innovators suffer when they're trying to get something onto the market.
[00:05:25] Jo Burgess: The session that we had in Madrid was all about the opposite of that, so we talked about Pilot Heaven, and there were four heroes of the water industry who provided the meat of that session, and those were organizations that have been through the trial and purchase process that we have, and shown that if you do have a clear, scalable, replicable pathway to adoption, you don't have to get stuck in pilot purgatory. You can just go through to implementation at the end of your trial period.
[00:05:54] Piers Clark: Okay. Give me some real-life examples.
[00:05:58] Jo Burgess: I'll give you three.
[00:05:59] Jo Burgess: Cameron White at KenWave and Tico Michels at Brabant Water in the Netherlands. Brabant is a Dutch utility, highly regulated. They needed a non-invasive, very accurate mechanism for getting structural health data for their asbestos cement pipelines, ideally without invading the pipe because the carbon footprint of plant hire and excavation and earthworks, every time you want to check something, is enormous.
[00:06:25] Jo Burgess: So using the Climate Change Trial Reservoir, they trialed KenWave's Dynamic Response Imaging, or DRI technology. And because we took on the financial risk, Brabant could establish the clear KPIs up front along with KenWave, and upon success they've committed to a further 12 kilometers of inspection, and they have become a partner for other utilities in the region.
[00:06:47] Jo Burgess: So it's turned the vendor-supplier dynamic into a partnership.
[00:06:53] Piers Clark: And just help me, how long did it go from the first time KenWave or Brabant reached out to you and said, "Hey, we've heard about the Trial Reservoirs. Could we use this?" to them actually completing?
[00:07:04] Jo Burgess: The setup process was a four-month process. Bearing in mind that all of the mental heavy lifting to design the trial and the purchase have to be done before the trial can commence.
[00:07:14] Jo Burgess: So instead of having a small agreement to do a pilot, doing a pilot, and then going, "Oh, that was really interesting. How would we go about procuring it?", we move all of that thinking to the beginning.
[00:07:24] Jo Burgess: So the setup process was four months, including Christmas, so in work terms it was probably three months. And then the trial period was another four months. So actually in just under 10 months, we'd done the setup, the trial, and the reporting and evaluation process so that we'd reached agreement that the KPIs had been met and the partnership took flight.
[00:07:45] Piers Clark: Excellent. Give me the second example.
[00:07:47] Jo Burgess: The second example, one of my other speakers was the CEO of Desolenator, Adri Pols. Desolenator has a technology called SP40, which stands for Steampunk 40, which I just love. It is a solar powered groundwater or seawater desalination system, and they undertook a trial with a company called Silal in the UAE.
[00:08:08] Jo Burgess: All of the Emirates face massive issues with food shortages, food security, water, and energy, and food all coming together as a nexus challenge. They import 85% of their food, and they rely very heavily on fossil fuels.
[00:08:23] Jo Burgess: SP40 is a fully circular, solar powered desalination and cooling platform that produces absolutely no brine, which is really unusual, if not unique for a desalination system. And with our support, they demonstrated their technology for agriculture at Silal's greenhouses. A lot of people don't know that 75% of the water demand for greenhouse agriculture is for cooling, not for irrigation.
[00:08:49] Jo Burgess: And in the work that they've done, they've accelerated their own development and become a semifinalist in the XPRIZE Water Scarcity Competition, which was also announced in Madrid.
[00:08:59] Piers Clark: Excellent. And again, they did the trial, it was successful. They've taken the next step in the commitment, have they?
[00:09:06] Jo Burgess: Exactly so, yes. Exactly so. The trial was set up to demonstrate that the proof of concept worked in Silal's exact situation. So they built a plant, and they provided a digital twin of that same plant for Silal in Abu Dhabi, and they physically put in greenhouses and grew salad, tomatoes. They grew salad out of next to nothing in the desert, and the photos are just surreal. It looks amazing.
[00:09:31] Piers Clark: Nice. I love that example one was in Europe, example two's in the Middle East. I'm intrigued as to where example three's gonna take us.
[00:09:39] Jo Burgess: Example three's gonna take us to Canada. So, we have another Trial Reservoir, the Advanced and Industrial Trial Reservoir, which looks at sustainability in a slightly broader way than climate change alone.
[00:09:50] Jo Burgess: And this particular example was EnBiorganic Technologies, who have a bioaugmentation technology called EBS-Di. They were putting it in place for Meadow Lake Mechanical Pulp, a Paper Excellence plant in Saskatchewan, where they were aiming towards zero liquid discharge, but they had an issue with color, primarily in the water that they wanted to reuse.
[00:10:10] Jo Burgess: Because it was being held in lagoons, algae were growing in the lagoons, and everything they tried to recycle back to the plant was green. Nobody wants all their paper to be green. So, we had to support EnBiorganic Technologies in providing a very low carbon biological methodology, which both removed the color and lowered the COD in the water that the plant wanted to reuse to acceptable levels so that they could reuse it and achieve zero liquid discharge on site.
[00:10:37] Jo Burgess: That one worked so well that before the trial period had reached an end, all of the KPIs had been absolutely smashed. The technology was working brilliantly, and Meadow Lake gave their PO before the trial had completed.
[00:10:51] Piers Clark: These are three brilliant stories, and I love the international flavor there.
[00:10:55] Piers Clark: Tell me about the stats as to how many trials work and how many trials fail, because of course there's this risk, isn't there? If the trial doesn't meet its KPIs, then everyone's grown up about it, it's learning, that's banked, and we move forward.
[00:11:06] Piers Clark: But how many of the trials that you're testing don't meet their KPIs?
[00:11:11] Jo Burgess: If they all worked, that would mean we weren't taking enough risk. If we already knew what would work, there would be no need for what we're doing.
[00:11:18] Jo Burgess: It's always above 70%, and we hover anywhere between 72 and 76%, depending on the exact numbers.
[00:11:25] Piers Clark: Those are incredible stats. I used to work in innovation in Thames Water and in United Utilities, and you'd do a trial, and you'd be lucky if 1 in 20 of them got traction. You're saying that 70% of the trials that you undertake through the Trial Reservoir have resulted in some sort of follow on purchase order, next step?
[00:11:43] Jo Burgess: Yes, exactly so. And the next step has varied from full-scale deployment to the next step after a small trial. It might be a big field scale, serious undertaking that involves civil works and installation. But yes, we are currently on 72.5% success rate. The industry average is between 20% and 25%, so I'm proud of that statistic.
[00:12:06] Jo Burgess: Yeah. And the secret is the trial and purchase agreement, is because all of the thinking has to be done before the trial begins, so we don't get to the end and it depends how somebody feels about anything. Everything is objective. Everything is unambiguous. Everything's been agreed, including how many units will be bought and what the price is that will be paid for them before anything even begins at the start of the trial.
[00:12:28] Piers Clark: Brilliant. I obviously have followed the Trial Reservoir. I was part of the original genesis of the idea. But Jo, it's incredible what you've achieved, and I'm in awe of how quickly the Foundation has got traction.
[00:12:42] Jo Burgess: So the news just broke that the Tech Ascend Foundation is a finalist for the 2026 Keeling Curve Prize, and the laureates will be announced in July, and I'm so excited by even the possibility just to have made the finalist list.
[00:12:56] Piers Clark: Excellent. All right. We're running out of time unfortunately, and we always like to finish with a bit of a personal question. So Jo, what advice would you give someone coming into the water sector today?
[00:13:06] Jo Burgess: Anybody who's getting into the water sector will find that they are in a sector like no other. Everybody here is here for the sake of something or someone outside of themselves. Now, whether that's to provide unserved communities with safe water, whether it's to protect the environment, it always almost doesn't matter. But you will find hundreds and thousands of amazing people who are here basically for selfless reasons.
[00:13:32] Jo Burgess: So firstly, I would say welcome. Secondly, is you don't have to have all of the answers all by yourself. This is absolutely a team sport. You'll always be part of something that's bigger than you.
[00:13:43] Jo Burgess: So, if you think that it's not worth trying to do something because you can't do all of it, don't let that put you off. Just do the little bit you can do wherever you are in the world, and between us, we'll get everything done.
[00:13:54] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me, Piers Clark, and my guest today has been Dr. Jo Burgess, Chief Executive for the Tech Ascend Foundation, the not-for-profit sister company of the Isle Group, which has been delivering the Trial Reservoirs, and we've been talking about Pilot Heaven.
[00:14:11] Piers Clark: Thank you to our sponsors, and until next time, keep asking questions, keep sharing, and keep safe.