The client

Aquafin is the Belgian leader in wastewater management. The organisation recovers water, energy and raw materials from sewage water and keeps local watercourses stocked and healthy.

Knight Moves and Aquafin work together to take innovation to the next level in all layers of the organisation. We do this by getting everyone on board and thus strengthening the innovation culture.

Expertise

Future proof your services

Bring ideas to the users

‘Driving our innovation culture requires a combination of disciplines, which Knight Moves provides perfectly. Our innovation partner brings all the necessary skills to accelerate our transformation and make long-term impact together.’

— Maarten Raemdonck, Head of Innovation Aquafin

The challenge

Aquafin wanted to streamline the innovation process, which was proving too complex, and make it more efficient. In addition, the organisation wanted to integrate innovation into the corporate culture and make it accessible to all employees.

In terms of services, Aquafin wanted to shift its focus from wastewater treatment to new and sustainable services for citizens, cities and municipalities.

Knight Moves partnered with Aquafin employees to stimulate, pitch and market new ideas.

Our approach

1. De innovatiestrategie vertalen naar een helder en doeltreffend proces waarin ideeën floreren (top-down)

Through co-creation, we started by simplifying and improving the innovation process. We visualised innovation streams to make the process transparent for all Aquafin employees.

To make the innovation strategy concrete, twice a year we launch a new strategic theme with key challenges in which we involve the entire organisation. We distribute these challenges through various internal channels so that Aquafin employees can actively participate in finding solutions.

A first theme with which we stirred up creative thinking among employees was ‘The construction site of the future’.

In this digital innovation guide (available in Dutch only), employees will find all the necessary tools to also be able to work through the innovation process themselves in an accessible way.

2. Foster and sustain a culture of innovation (bottom-up)

Now that the innovation process is clear to everyone, we engage employees to actively come up with solutions to strategic challenges within Aquafin.

We launch concrete challenges on Aquafin's ideas platform, where employees can submit ideas and interact with colleagues.
For employees who cannot immediately come up with an idea, we organise ‘ideation sessions’, in which we provide practical frameworks to stimulate out-of-the-box thinking.
We give employees the right tools to get started with innovation. We do this through training, coaching and a digital innovation guide.
Concrete training goals include:
- Learning to pitch: convincingly presenting ideas
- Determine the challenge by doing quick research in reality
- Develop an idea that is viable, feasible and desirable
- Solve the problem iteratively with a clear value proposition, prototypes and validation research
- Working out a business model that makes the concept self-sustaining for the organisation
We organise a pitch event where employees can pitch their own ideas and be assigned a sponsor to help them along the way.
At key moments in the innovation process, we provide coaching to employees on how to further develop their idea.
By translating the approach into a clear communication strategy, we lay the foundations for a self-sustaining innovation community.

‘We saw Aquafin evolve in no time into an organisation that breathes innovation. People dare to bring in ideas, have the tools to get started with them and work with us to develop them into fully-fledged services for citizens, cities and municipalities.’

— Cedric Kamp, Service Innovation Lead at Knight Moves

An illustration of a funnel with 243 new ideas of which 116 were closed, 35 were included in ongoing processes and 10 have already been implemented.

Over the last few years, many ideas have flowed through all the way to implementation

The results

Already during the first year of our partnership, we saw a noticeable increase in Aquafin's innovative potential:

Five innovative challenges were launched.
The idea platform Yambla gained 30% more users.
23 ideas were pitched, 17 of which were selected for further development. These ideas are very diverse as these examples show:
- A new way to make concrete for complex structures on shipyards
- Ideas for a safer and more qualitative construction site
- A new perspective on knowledge acquisition
- A way to better involve local residents in construction sites
- Ideas to avoid flooding
- New technologies for more efficient water treatment
23 employees successfully completed our innovation training.
We launched ‘Impact Day’, a day celebrating innovation and thanking the innovation community.

A big group of people watch a colleague pitch an idea

A group of people are debriefing sat around a table

A speaker during the internal innovation day called Impact Day, his presentation reads 'fail forward'

The audience during the internal innovation day called Impact Day

A presentation of two speakers during the internal innovation day called Impact Day

‘Breathing extra life into the culture of innovation at the same time as making a tangible impact on services, that is the outcome we set out to achieve together and are still delivering.’

— Lien Dewitte, Service Designer & Researcher at Knight Moves