Northumbrian Water's Innovation Festival - RDMAI Day 4

RDMAI: Day 4: Building a tangible prototype

It’s Day 4 at the River Deep Mountain AI (RDMAI) sprint here at Northumbrian Water’s #InnovationFestival24.

Yesterday, the teams in the sprint pitched their concepts for the RDMAI project on white boards and in words. Today, the last day at the festival, is all about turning those abstract ideas into prototypes. It’s about trusting the sprint process - and leaning into the community that the team has built over the last few days - to take the project forward.

The goal of the day is to end up with a tangible product or service that removes a specific pain that stakeholders of river water quality health are feeling. Though this is Day 4 of the sprint, it represents ‘Day 1’, or Lift Off Day’ for the RDMAI team.

The moment came when each of the sprint teams presented their projects, and what a fantastic array of brilliant ideas they were, including how AI can be used to predict algal blooms and forecasting phosphate runoff.

What next?

The project already has the funding to move forward and now, because of this fantastically immersive sprint, it has the ideas – and one of them will become a reality over the next three months. The RDMAI team will continue to work with the incredible community of experts that has come together at the sprint to challenge how the project moves forward. They have a delivery plan and now have the minds to join the plan and feed into it.

“The sprint has delivered results beyond our expectations,” said Elisabeth Sund, Cognizant Designer & Strategist and RDMAI facilitator.

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Lucy Fraser

Content Copywriter

Lucy brings 25+ years’ experience as a copywriter and editor to join WRc as a content copywriter in the Commercial Services team. She has a portfolio of work that includes, magazine articles, blog posts, interviews and conference presentations across a wide range of business sectors, including sport, travel, finance and real estate.