Water innovation must deliver practical impact, Wetsus’s Cees Buisman tells IWA congress

The water industry needs to move beyond simply generating new ideas and concentrate on innovation that makes a practical difference, Cees Buisman of Wetsus told the IWA World Water Congress in Glasgow on 5 October.

In his keynote, “The quest for meaningful and efficient watertech innovation”, Buisman argued that innovation must move beyond producing new ideas to practical, meaningful impact. IWA’s account of the session quoted him: “We should combine imagination with meaningful impact.”

A panel moderated by Paul O’Callaghan of BlueTech Research followed, with Ulrik Gernow of Grundfos, Valerie Naidoo of the Water Research Commission, Amanda Lake of Jacobs and Angela MacOscar of Northumbrian Water.

An institute built to share risk

Buisman is scientific director of Wetsus, the European centre of excellence for sustainable water technology in Leeuwarden in the Netherlands, and a professor at Wageningen University & Research. Wetsus works as a pre-competitive research platform: companies help choose and fund research themes, and universities and research institutes carry out the science.

Buisman has described a model in which large and small companies pay the same programme contribution and have an equal voice, so that shared funding lets them take more technological risk than they would alone. Its partners include Wageningen, Delft, Eindhoven, Groningen and Twente universities. Wetsus says 105 water-technology companies have started in and around WaterCampus Leeuwarden since 2003, 47 of them Wetsus spin-offs. Its themes include treatment and reuse, recovering materials and nutrients, membranes and separation, and energy from water.

A well-documented gap

The gap between ideas and impact is well documented. BlueTech Research’s adoption model puts the journey from a first lighthouse project to mainstream market acceptance at roughly 12 to 16 years, and its 2025 Water Innovation Townhall attributed slow adoption to procurement, regulation and operational conservatism as much as to technical maturity. A Water Research Foundation survey found technologies can spend six or more years in the late-majority phase before the market is saturated.

The reasons are familiar to anyone selling to utilities: they provide essential services and carry the public-health and compliance risk if a new process fails; they buy through formal tenders and frameworks; and they want reference sites — the proof a new technology can only get from a first utility willing to take the risk. BlueTech has cited Evove, which moved from pilot to demonstration in about four years, roughly half the typical timeline, as an example of what is possible when a technology fits utility operating realities and lowers the risk of adopting it.

Reported from the IWA World Water Congress & Exhibition, Glasgow, 5 October 2026.

Written with AI assistance from IWA’s published accounts and the cited sources; the session facts were confirmed to The Stratawire at the congress. The illustration is AI-generated and is not a photograph of the event.