Szu-Hsin Wu
In the Dŵr Uisce project, it is part of our innovative culture to working with stakeholders on co-designing, co-developing and co-implement green innovation which mitigate impacts on the environment.
In collaboration with National Trust (UK) and National Federation of Group Water Scheme, Dŵr Uisce researcher and stakeholders have installed micro-hydropower energy recovery system at two demonstration sites: Tŷ Mawr Wybrnant and Blackstairs Group Water Scheme. The process of achieving green innovation has never been easy and straightforward. We encountered numbers of unknown problems and challenges. Without our valuable stakeholders being patience and continuously engaged in the collaboration process, we could not have achieved what we have today. Various forms of actionable knowledge were generated and accumulated from the process. For example, engineering researchers learned insights from realizing the system design in a controlled setting. Researchers from the management discipline also learned how to communicate innovation performance and commercialise the technology to stakeholders and a wider audience. All stakeholders obtained the codified processed experience from designing in the system, communicating with stakeholders and installing the system that can be used for the next cycle of green innovation.
Generating and accumulating new actionable knowledge was through intuiting, interpreting, integrating and institutionalizing. Through intuiting, engineers identified patterns, possibilities, similarities and differences between the two sites. Through interpreting the results of feasibility studies, we selected suitable energy recovery possibilities within specific domains or environments. Through integrating the knowledge, both the academic researchers and the practitioners developed a shared understanding of the objectives, engineering choices and criteria for evaluation and installed the system. This integration took place through direct interaction among group members in order to attain coherence. The Dŵr Uisce team then institutionalised the learning from Blackstairs Group Water Scheme demon site and leveraged it for Tŷ Mawr Wybrnant site and consolidating the learning for further application.
We know that innovation is rarely a linear process and rarely stop at a point of time. We work continuously and closely with stakeholders on innovation. And in the near future, we hope to share more insights from implementing our Wastewater Heat Recovery Systems at other demonstration sites.