DC Water Innovation Program Taps into the Hidden Strength of the Workforce

As one of three primary themes of DC Water’s Blue Horizon 2020 Strategic Plan, DC Water is developing an Innovation Program to crowdsource ideas across the authority (and ultimately with customers and stakeholders), and deliver the best ideas that achieve value. DC Water has a strong record in R&D innovation adopting new, safer, quicker, and less costly approaches. The Innovation Program builds off this success and involves a wider audience. DC Water worked with key internal stakeholders developing a strategy and implementation plan. Facilitated workshops with 50+ employees focused on defining innovation at DC Water, opportunities, barriers, innovation vision, and considerations for implementation.DC Water established an Innovation Vision that reflects the desire for Innovation to be wide-ranging in ideas considered, and focused on realizing value for employees and customers, not limited only to monetary savings. Ideas are not only changes or inventions, but may also be advances not previously implemented at DC Water.DC Water strives to achieve an innovative culture that is open and collaborative, democratic and empowering, and voluntary with a strong commitment to learning and improving. The innovation process starts with asking the right question, or identifying challenges that, if solved, provide great benefit. Then a focused and transparent idea selection process to choose the best ideas from the many proposed provides clarity for determining which ideas to implement. Success requires cost effective and engaging capture and filtering of ideas from DC Water’s multiple business units and geographic sites so a central technology platform was competitively procured after clearly defining the critical functionality requirements. As DC Water continues to implement Innovation, program specifics are adjusted to reflect operating needs and to realize the benefit of full-utility engagement in idea generation. The vision aims to tap into the wealth of knowledge and creative problem solving that DC Water staff possess.