From https://waterinnovation.challenges.org/

Ofwat, the Water Services Regulation Authority for England and Wales, has established a £200 million Innovation Fund to grow the water sector’s capacity to innovate, enabling it to better meet the evolving needs of customers, society and the environment.

The innovation fund is designed to complement Ofwat’s existing approach to innovation and to help deliver against Ofwat’s strategy which highlights the role of innovation in meeting many of the challenges the sector faces.

From 2021, we will be launching two competitions that water companies, in partnerships with others, can enter with their innovations.

• A £2 million Innovation in Water Challenge (IWC) with opportunity to win funding up to £250,000. The first round of the IWC will open on 18 January 2021. The entry period lasts six weeks, closing at 12 noon (GMT) on 26 February 2021.
• A £40 million main competition. The first round will open for entries in Spring 2021. More details will be available from early 2021.

You can find out details about each competition on their dedicated pages. We expect different rounds of the competitions to run until 2025, but our goal is that the Innovation Fund’s impact will continue well beyond this.