The water sector doesn’t have an innovation problem — it has an implementation problem. Investment is at a record high and the pipeline is full, yet few proven solutions ever become standard practice. Drawing on the World Economic Forum’s new deployment report and over 70% adoption rates at the Trial Reservoirs Initiative, Jo Burgess argues that the next decade will be won on implementation — and that the discipline to design every trial as the first step of a deployment is what separates the winners from the stalls.

From Pilots to Practice: Why the Next Decade of Water Innovation Will Be Won on Implementation

After 25 years in water innovation, and a seat on the working group behind the World Economic Forum’s new report on deployment, I have reached one conclusion: the water sector does not have an innovation problem. It has an implementation problem. 

The question has changed from “does it work?” to “why doesn’t it scale?”

In 2022, in A Freshwater Future, I argued that water was missing from decarbonisation strategies and that the many barriers to innovation could be distilled into a single one: culture. Four years on, it’s encouraging to see that the conversation has matured. Investment reached a record $1.12 billion in 2024, up 29% on the year before, and water technology companies are now valued at more than $25 billion. Capital is flowing and the pipeline is full. But there’s a harder question: once promising solutions are developed and financed, why do so few become standard practice? 

That is the question at the heart of the World Economic Forum and UpLink’s new community paper, Making Water Innovation Work: Enabling Large-Scale Deployment, which I contributed to as a member of its Implementing Water Innovation Working Group. At the report’s launch I joined a panel with Chengzi Chew (Grundfos), Oliver Puckering (Xylem), Christian Montag (iFlux) and Alex Plant (Scottish Water), moderated by Megan Gerryts and Claudia Ukonu of the Forum. The discussion showed how far the debate has moved from “does the technology work?” to “who buys it, on what terms, and who carries the risk?”

The chasm is real, and measurable

Making Water Innovation Work focuses on why promising water innovations stall between early adoption and mainstream deployment. Its most sobering statistic comes from a longitudinal study of 84 water technology companies founded between 2000 and 2005. A paltry 12.5% succeeded, against roughly 20% in a typical venture capital model. The report frames this as promising technologies stalling after early success, not technologies that simply failed to work, which makes the number more sobering, not less. But why?

The report uses Geoffrey Moore’s “chasm” to explain the reason we see this again and again in the water sector. Early adopters buy novelty. The pragmatic majority buys reliability, reference customers (existing users in comparable settings who can vouch that it works), and low implementation risk. These are virtues in the water sector: critical infrastructure, public health exposure, long asset lives, fragmented local governance, and procurement are all designed to minimise risk rather than invite novelty. A pilot proves that something can work. Mainstream buyers need proof that it will work in their own system, under their own contracts, with their own people.

Sector caution is rational, but it has a cost. A quarter of the world’s population already lives under extremely high water stress, and global water demand is projected to exceed available supply by 40% by 2030. Every proven solution that stalls at the pilot stage is resilience, capacity and carbon saving that we are not banking.

Five mechanisms from the Aquapreneur portfolio, one logic

The report draws on the Aquapreneur Innovation Initiative, launched in 2022 by the World Economic Forum’s UpLink platform and HCL Group, which has committed CHF 15 million ($18 million) over five years. The initiative supports early-stage water innovators, known as Aquapreneurs, and has built a multi-stakeholder ecosystem of investors, corporates, utilities and partners around them. The working group combined an analysis of all 40 Aquapreneur ventures with six detailed case studies and interviews with 35 stakeholders, and from this, the report identifies five mechanisms that progressively reduce adoption uncertainty:

1. Demand: a problem acute enough that changing practice is less risky than standing still.
2. Validation: credible evidence under real operating conditions.
3. Procurement: a route from successful testing to purchase.
4. Financing: capital matched to the deployment pathway, not just the technology.
5. Evidence: comparable results that make the second, third and tenth deployment easier than the first.

The important point is that these are not sequential stages. They operate together and reinforce one another. So must a pilot address all five, rather than just a few? The report’s answer is that it is the combination that enables repeatable deployment, even if the weight of each varies by context. My own answer is a plain yes, and from day one. Many sector programmes still treat them as a relay race, where grant-funded validation hands over to procurement, which hands over to finance. In practice, if the procurement route and the finance structure are not designed before the trial starts, the trial is simply an expensive demonstration.

What the case studies teach

The six cases span Argentina, the USA, India, Canada and Belgium, and they share more than their differences suggest.

They chose narrow beachheads. Kilimo, an Argentine ag-climate tech company, pays farmers to adopt more efficient irrigation and sells the verified water savings to corporates such as Microsoft, Intel and Coca-Cola. It targeted corporates with volumetric replenishment commitments in water-stressed basins, which many had made but had no credible, scalable way to meet. Membrion, a US company whose electro-ceramic membranes treat hard-to-treat wastewater onsite, went after semiconductor manufacturers, where AI-driven demand is pushing up high-strength wastewater volumes. FREDsense, a Canadian company with a portable onsite PFAS test, focused on airports replacing PFAS-containing firefighting foams, which must prove their systems are decontaminated and were otherwise waiting weeks for laboratory results. None started with “utilities” or “industry” as a whole.

They sold outcomes, not equipment. Kilimo is paid only for independently verified water savings. Membrion offers treatment-as-a-service that can be removed if performance falls short. Epic Cleantec, which recycles blackwater, greywater and rainwater in commercial and multi-family buildings, takes on operations and maintenance risk. Each moved risk from the buyer to the innovator, which is commercially uncomfortable for the innovator but decisive for the buyer.

They had regulatory or commercial tailwinds. Indra Water, whose modular systems help Indian industrial plants treat tough wastewater and reuse up to 99% of it, and FREDsense benefited from tightening regulation. Epic Cleantec helped shape the permitting frameworks that then created its market. Demand is rarely created by innovators alone.

They built references. Fifteen Fifty, Salesforce Tower and the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills are highly visible buildings, so each Epic Cleantec system there doubles as a showroom: the next developer can see onsite reuse running, permitted and maintained by certified operators, in a building they know. Those references now support adoption in markets without similar regulation, where decisions rest on operating performance and building economics alone. They do more for sales than any brochure.

The New York City Environmental Tech Lab, profiled as a public-sector example, shows the same logic in a municipal setting and puts most of the five mechanisms to work. The city’s Department of Environmental Protection, which runs the largest water and wastewater system in the US, defines the problems (demand). Selected companies run a three-month proof of concept with its operators and engineers (validation). Pre-agreed KPIs, clear go/no-go decision points and guidance on insurance, cybersecurity and data access create a route to purchase (procurement). And results become a credible reference (evidence), with the Partnership Fund for NYC acting as trusted intermediary throughout. Of 24 technologies tested since 2023, three have reached commercial procurement.. That is a modest conversion rate, but it is a visible, repeatable pathway, and the sector has very few of those. Financing is the one mechanism the report does not attribute to the Lab, which is worth remembering for my third point below.

Where I would push further

The report is candid that its case studies are illustrations, not prescriptions. Three caveats are worth drawing out.

First, the beachheads are mostly industrial and commercial. Corporates can trial unfamiliar tech, contract, and pay for outcomes faster than regulated utilities, which carry statutory obligations, regulatory scrutiny and asset-life risk. The utility experience is thinner in the evidence, and it is where most of the water sector’s capital expenditure sits. Procurement reform for regulated utilities is harder than the case studies imply.

Second, there is survivorship bias. The case studies are the ventures that crossed the chasm. The majority that did not would tell us at least as much about which mechanism failed first.

Third, the five mechanisms are not weighted. The report says their importance varies by context, which is true, but practitioners need help deciding which is the binding constraint in a given situation. In my experience it is most often procurement and financing, and the two are frequently designed in isolation. The reason is structural. A trial is paid for from an innovation, grant, or R&D budget, while the purchase that follows belongs to an operational or capital budget held by someone who never signed up to the trial. Nobody owns the gap between the two, so the trial ends, the report is written, and the decision to buy goes back to the start of a procurement process designed for familiar, standard products. That is a failure of design, not of technology or goodwill.

It also suggests a metric. The report rightly says the objective is not to run more trials. I would go further: as long as we measure innovation programmes by the number of trials run rather than the proportion that convert into deployment, we will keep rewarding the stall. The sector should be publishing conversion rates.

Designing the pathway before the trial

We know, and the report backs this up, that the numbers for water technology adoption are woefully low. The evidence from its case studies suggests there are things we can do to change that, chiefly addressing all five mechanisms in concert rather than one at a time and hoping the rest will follow. At Isle, Tech Ascend, and the Trial Reservoirs Initiative, we know this from lived experience. It is why we created TRI and engineered it to overcome exactly these hurdles.

This is where the model first set out in the 2022 paper, the Trial Reservoirs’ Trial & Purchase Agreement, becomes relevant again. The idea is an evergreen pool of money – a Reservoir which, like a water reservoir, has money flow out and back in and out again, and  which releases funds only when a trial has been designed to lead directly to full-scale commercial implementation if it succeeds. The trial must include agreed technical, economic, and service target performance metrics, and the trial agreement must also describe the path to post-trial procurement and implementation if those targets are met. Revenue from successful implementation enables the technology vendor to put the money back into the Reservoir, so the capital can be recycled into the next trial.

Read against the 2026 report, the logic is the same. Pre-scoped KPIs address validation and procurement. Capital tied to the deployment pathway addresses financing. A documented trial outcome addresses evidence. And the arrangement is, by design, collaborative: the end user, the innovator and the funder all have to agree on a clear, detailed route to scale before the money moves. 

And it works: over 70% of the trials run through the Trial Reservoirs Initiative have led to adoption. That is not a like-for-like comparison with the 12.5% startup success rate, since one measures trials and the other companies, but the gap is large enough to suggest that design matters. The Initiative follows the formula the report describes. Nothing is funded until the route to purchase is laid out, success criteria are set with the end user, and repayment depends on implementation, so every party has a stake in the trial leading somewhere. The 2026 report gives this thinking its evidence base. It shows that implementation pathways designed up front, with shared risk and clear decision points, are what separate the 12.5% from the rest.

Conclusion: A great deployment decade lies ahead if…

The report ends with a line worth repeating: previous decades expanded the water sector’s capacity to innovate, and the decade ahead must strengthen its capacity to implement. Its recommendations are addressed to each part of the ecosystem. Drawing on them, and on what we have seen at Trial Reservoirs Initiative, this is what I would ask of each reader:

• Utilities and corporates define problems before seeking solutions, and give innovation budgets and executive sponsors the same standing as capital programmes.
• Regulators and public bodies create sandboxes, testbeds and procurement routes that preserve accountability while letting new technologies compete.
• Investors and funders match capital to the deployment pathway, and fund the operational validation that generates credible evidence alongside the technology.
• Innovators sell the whole solution and take on part of the implementation risk.
• Intermediaries keep building the trust that lets all of the above happen.

Implementation has to become a systems-level capability rather than a series of heroic one-off projects. If you take one thing from this article, make it a question to ask before you fund, approve or run your next pilot: who will buy this if it works, on what terms, and from which budget? Those of us working in this space have the technologies, and increasingly the capital. What we need now is the discipline to design every trial as the first step of a deployment.

Jo Burgess is CEO of Tech Ascend and head of Trial Reservoir Global Services at Isle. If you want to know more about the Trial Reservoirs Initiative or discuss a potential trial, visit https://isleutilities.com/trial-reservoirs-initiative/ or email her at [email protected].