Joshua Griffis

Joshua Griffis is the person a big water company sends out to find the technology it does not yet have. As Director of Technology & Innovation, first at Evoqua Water Technologies and now at Xylem after the two merged, his job is open innovation, which is the unglamorous but valuable work of scouting the market for outside technologies, deciding which ones are real, and bringing them inside. Evoqua named him its Inventor of the Year twice and recognised his Invention of the Year twice more, so this is someone who both finds other people's ideas and generates his own.

Joshua Griffis frames the search the way the business is built. Evoqua, he explained on the show, ran on a two-segment structure, one half selling products and the other selling solutions and services, and inside that services half sit defined customer verticals like microelectronics or oil and gas. Each vertical hands his team a need statement, and only then do the technology scouts go looking. So the hunt always starts from a real customer problem rather than from a clever piece of science looking for a use, which is a distinction that quietly separates corporate innovation that ships from the kind that stays in a slide deck.

Joshua Griffis is also disciplined about how finished a technology has to be before he will touch it. His threshold is roughly TRL 6 to 7, TRL being the Technology Readiness Level scale NASA invented to grade how baked a technology is from 1 to 9, where 6 to 7 means a working system already proven in a real operational setting rather than a promising result in a university lab. He still wants a portfolio that mixes newer bets with fully commercial ones, but the bias is towards things that are nearly ready to sell. Green hydrogen is the example he reaches for, because a single electrolyzer needs water treatment from the raw intake all the way to the ultrapure step, and Evoqua already had a technology for each link in that chain.

Joshua Griffis talks about innovation less as a lab and more as a culture you have to protect. He describes building a safe space where his team is free to fail, because the metric he cares about, Evoqua's "Inventor of the Year," is fed by invention disclosures that pile up into provisional filings and eventually into real patents, and you do not get that pipeline if people are scared to try. What stuck with me, though, is how he measures the work. He puts intellectual property and decision velocity alongside whether each person on his team is growing, and he points out that every Evoqua meeting opens with a safety moment and a note on personal development, which for a discipline that usually gets measured in patent counts is a more human scorecard than you would expect.

“Every Evoqua meeting starts with a safety moment and personal development, because we want our people to feel like we're investing back into them. So it's not just about having a safe space to create innovation and be creative. It's also about you as a person. And if you achieve all those things, magic happens.”

Joshua Griffis is, in short, the in-house counterpart to the startup founders this show usually features: not the inventor with one big idea, but the person who decides which ideas a water giant actually bets on, and who came on the microphone to hand listeners the open-innovation playbook to copy.