One of the Weekly BlueTech Analyst Alerts that caught my eye this week, was the new collaboration that was announced and is being deployed across the Phoenix metropolitan area to reduce 350km of water network leakage on an Epcor Water Services operated network, over 10 years in partnership with Microsoft and FIDO.
Why we find this interesting?
This is a great example of Radical Collaboration for Regeneration and Innovation with Impact. This on the back of the recent announcement between FIDO, Thames Water and Microsoft to use a similar model to help tackle water loss in London. This partnership model represents something of a holy trinity; a water utility that has a water network with leaks, financing from one of the world’s largest tech companies which happens to have made a commitment to help off-set its water use, and a solution from digital data driven water technology start-up.
The business model that FIDO is adopting here, is replicable and scalable and it could send this company into Level 2 Impact within a 3-5 year period. (Level 2 Impact is >$100M/ annum revenue, deployed in more than 10 countries and more than 100 references globally). FIDO has a solid leadership team and extremely solid investors.
Water leakage rates often exceed 30%. At the same time, there are an increasing number of cities all across the world that have shown that they can achieve leakage rates of under 10%. BlueTech Research has recently produced a Water Leakage: Innovation Impact Map that identifies which cities in the world that have achieved this holy grail of less than 10% water leakage rates. So far, we have identified 25 locations globally. We are in the process of adding to this and will publish and share this map at our upcoming breakfast briefings at WEFTEC and Aquatech. These are the Light House cities and water utilities.
The Innovation Adoption Theory we apply to water, tells us that once we hit Early Majority, we are over the thermodynamic hump and this starts to just become the accepted norm and standard. As well as saving water, it also reduces energy and carbon. This is one of the Top 10 Impact Areas we have identified. The rate of change and adoption will be accelerated by innovative partnership models such as the one with FIDO and Microsoft, which could be replicated by others, for example companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Electro Scan Inc., and impact investment funds such as WaterEquity are just a few examples. Our goal is to track the rate of change over time, the Delta T, and illuminate the acceleration in adoption.
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