The ‘sky is the limit’ for Yorkshire-based Flood Technology Group after it secured the backing of Innovate UK Business Growth, the UK’s government innovation agency.
Part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), Innovate UK Business Growth’s mission is to help businesses grow through the development and commercialisation of new products, processes and services. It achieves this by offering intensive and bespoke support to help innovation-focused businesses of no more than 250 employees accelerate their growth.
As our picture (below) shows, Simon Gilliland, Chief Executive of Flood Technology Group, recently met with David Brayne, a Senior Innovation and Growth Specialist delivering Innovate UK Business Growth services in the North of England.
Following their meeting, Simon said: “We are absolutely delighted to announce that Flood Technology Group is now being supported by Innovate UK Business Growth. It’s early days and we’re still working through the specifics of this in terms of the exact nature of the support we’ll be receiving, but David and I had a fruitful initial meeting, where I was able to introduce him to our long-standing research and development partners from the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Liverpool.”
Simon continued: “Flood Technology Group is not yet two years old but already growing and evolving at a rapid rate. We know that our unique flood adaptive technology has an enormous amount of, as yet, untapped potential to protect people, property and infrastructure across multiple sectors globally as we adapt to the growing threat posed by climate change.
“With Innovate UK’s backing, it really feels like the sky is the limit, thanks to its proven track record of helping innovative businesses to accelerate their growth. We’re very excited about what the future holds and look forward to working closely with them.”
David Brayne said: “Flood Technology Group has identified a solution that mitigates against the consequences of climate change and extreme weather events. It’s a great example of adapting traditional engineering, applying sensor technology and developing predictive software that come together to overcome these evolving meteorological challenges. It also unlocks social value of a scale as yet to be determined, not only by securing the integrity of assets in vulnerable zones but facilitating the utilisation of these zones throughout the year. We are working on a number of themes for support and helping to identify potential funding to address components of research and development that will help the solution to be adopted by asset owners, developers and regulators alike, both here in the UK and internationally.”
The support provided by Innovate UK Business Growth is for ambitious companies that want, and have the potential, to sustain or achieve growth. Eligible companies benefit from specialist support over an extended period, receiving one-to-one, tailored coaching to hone their commercial strategy and structure, and achieve impact in priority areas, such as innovation management, including intellectual property and infrastructure access; finance and funding strategy, including investment readiness; and expanding into international markets.
Flood Technology Group was established In November 2023 by Andrew Parker, who designed the groundbreaking Flood Adaptive Platform after witnessing the devastation that flooding caused to his friends and family. Andrew, whose background is in domestic construction, spent more than a decade honing his ideas and testing his products, working with experts at the University of Hull’s Flood Innovation Centre, the University of Liverpool and the HR Wallingford hydraulics research laboratory near Oxford.
He formed Flood Technology Group to bring his products to market and was soon joined in the business by Simon Gilliland, a leading flood risk expert who is also a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers and a member of Defra’s Property Flood Resilience Roundtable.
Flood Technology Group’s growing team is currently rolling its Flood Adaptive Platform and Flood Early Warning System technology out to the UK holiday and residential park sector, where there’s been huge demand from customers in riverside and coastal locations who are keen to future-proof their homes and businesses against the growing flood risk that we face. Flood Technology Group’s products have also been successfully applied to modular buildings and the team recently announced that it would soon be starting work on its first residential project at a riverside site here in the UK. However, they have vast potential to future-proof people, property and infrastructure across multiple sectors, both in the UK and globally.