In partnership with Innovate UK, Regen has developed the Playbook for Network Innovation to support projects throughout their journey and provide recommendations to shape the UK energy innovation landscape.
Project manager: Grace Millman
Project duration: July 2023 – March 2024
Network innovation funding has enabled improvements in efficiency, safety, customer service and resilience. We have seen some big steps forward, such as the testing and roll-out of active network management and flexibility markets. However, a more radical step change is required if we are to meet the net zero challenge.
The innovation landscape has also undergone a significant transformation in the last few years, with new price control periods and changing innovation funding.
Ofgem and Innovate UK are collaborating on the new Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF), which replaces the Network Innovation Competition (NIC) in the second RIIO price control period. With £450 million available over a five-year period, the vision for the SIF is to enable a ‘giant leap together’ in network innovation, helping to deliver net zero at the lowest cost to consumers by enabling strategic change. Working with other public funders of innovation, the SIF aims to deliver real net benefits to network companies, energy users and consumers, and help the UK become a global hub of energy innovation; a ‘Silicon Valley’ of energy.
Regen’s experience of working with the energy networks and innovators is that they face a number of challenges. This project has conducted a deep dive into previous projects to look for trends related to success and failure. This included looking at when useful learning was generated from the project, whether the innovation was rolled out into business-as-usual and whether a product or service was successfully commercialised.
This has been combined with existing academic research on innovation diffusion to identify targeted recommendations to the innovation community to increase the chances of successful deployment of future innovation projects. By harnessing these invaluable insights, we want to create a powerful resource that will guide innovators, energy networks and their partners as they develop and refine their ideas, craft project applications and embark on their journey of network innovation and successful deployment.
For more information, please reach out to the project lead, Grace Millman, or Regen’s head of innovation, Tamar Bourne.
