Third Session: “Targeting Quick Wins”

Recorded Webinar: “Targeting Quick Wins”

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• Amanda Tarp, FTD — Session 3 of the Semiconductor Water Innovation Series focuses on identifying near-term, high-impact “quick wins” for advancing water innovation. The session frames NGA’s priorities, why water innovation is difficult to deploy, and how coordinated industry action can convert today’s constraints into measurable progress.
• Dr. Slava Libman, FTD — The Next Generation Alliance (NGA) is positioned as a technology bridge designed to accelerate adoption by connecting pressing industry needs with validated, fab-ready solutions. This session builds on Why and Why Now by addressing what can realistically be implemented now to speed innovation and reduce risk.
• Lior Eshed, FTD — Water has shifted from a supporting utility to a manufacturing constraint that directly impacts ramp speed, capacity expansion, cost, compliance, and resilience. Lior outlines IRDS’s pressing needs and explains why adoption stalls due to fragmented criteria, site-specific pilots, limited data sharing, and high risk tolerance. He then highlights NGA’s quick-win focus areas: robust reclaim RO, brine minimization, and TOC reduction with lower chemical risk.
• Scott Bryan, Imagine H2O — The primary barrier to water innovation is adoption readiness, not lack of ideas or capital. Many organizations lack a clear internal owner empowered to say “yes” to new water technologies. Scott emphasizes that quick wins are structural improvements and repeatable adoption pathways, and that peer-based validation models like NGA can scale faster than one-off pilots.
• Chuck Dale, Veolia — From an integrator’s perspective, innovation struggles to scale because every fab has unique flowsheets, stakeholders, and risk profiles. “Death by pilot” and secrecy agreements slow progress. NGA can accelerate adoption by moving validation from site-specific preferences to industry-level evaluation, enabling solutions to be proven once and adopted broadly.
• Greg Newbloom, Membrion — The semiconductor industry does not avoid innovation; it avoids unmanaged risk. Step-change solutions can be adopted safely when risk is engineered out through containment, reversible deployment, phased ramp-up, and commercial models that shift performance and cost risk away from the fab. Peer validation through NGA is critical to scaling adoption beyond first-of-kind deployments.
• Q&A — Panelists discuss moving from subjective vendor claims to objective, data-driven validation, where and how to demonstrate new technologies, the true cost of innovation and ROI constraints, creative financing models, and the role of academia. The discussion reinforces that accelerating adoption requires shared validation, risk reduction, and industry-wide coordination rather than repeated site-by-site pilots.