Innovation

As an independent public organisation, we work with innovators across Great Britain to solve the toughest problems we face as an industry. Given our unique position, we facilitate innovation across the whole energy system, and work collaboratively with a wide range of stakeholders. 

Submit a proposal

If you want to submit a potential innovation idea we'd love to hear from you, please submit using the button below and we will get back to you.

Submit your idea

Intellectual Property Treatment under NIA Collaborations

 Ofgem’s RII0-3 NIA Governance Document (RIIO-3 NIA Governance Document) sets out key principles in respect of the treatment of intellectual property in NIA funded projects.  In particular it states that:

• Learning from NIA funded projects must be disseminated
• Intellectual Property arising from NIA funded projects (“Foreground IP”) must be made available to network licensees on a free of charge basis.

The Governance Document sets out a default ownership model for Foreground IP whereby Foreground IP is either owned by the creating party or parties or owned by NESO.   NESO’s preferred position is for NESO to own the Foreground IP, which avoids the complexities of joint ownership and ensures that NESO can satisfy the above requirements as to dissemination and licensing.

NESO welcomes discussions on licensing the Foreground IP to project partners for their own exploitation, on terms that reflect partners’ contribution to the project. 

Innovating to create value

Our innovative approach is already creating value, as these examples show:

• Accelerating the energy transition: We are applying transformational technologies to radically improve our analysis and forecasting, unlock more efficient operations, and support faster and more informed decision-making, all to further reduce system costs.
• Future markets to accelerate progress: Our coherent whole energy market strategy allows us to continually and collaboratively design and test market reforms so we can accelerate the energy transition and stimulate market competition.
• Improving constraint management: We are testing a range of approaches to economically mitigating limits on the amount of power that equipment can transmit.
• Examining system stability and resilience: Through knowledge and data sharing, we have improved our understanding of how and why the system may be affected by different factors, helping us reduce the impacts of increasing system complexity.

Explore our interactive graphic that highlights the exciting benefits of our innovative projects under the RIIO-2 framework. You can easily navigate to view the benefits either by strategic priority area or by benefit type.

We have a portfolio of active innovation projects funded by the Network Innovation Allowance (NIA), Network Innovation Competition (NIC), Ofgem's Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) and other research and development funds.