The global water crisis is one of the most fundamental challenges the world will face in the 21st Century. Currently, over 1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water and over 2.5 billion people lack access to safe sanitation. Whilst large parts of Europe still have an abundant water supply throughout most of the year, water scarcity, droughts, floods, ageing infrastructure, increasing energy demand and pollution are growing concerns in countries all over the continent. At the same time, the industrial use of water increases with industries water costs reaching up to 25% of the total production costs and Europe still fails to treat around 50% of its wastewater.

At the one hand, the growth potential for innovative water technologies and services is enormous and currently at a yearly pace of 10%. At the other hand, innovation support for this sector is often relatively poor and in many countries, it is not a priority sector such as low carbon. Consequently, access to innovation support is challenging for innovators and most of the INNOWATER innovation support tools are new to the sector.

The INNOWATER partnership aspires to address these challenges and to use the growth potential for sustainable water and wastewater innovators and industry users. INNOWATER is a public private innovation partnership of public innovation agencies, water associations and technology specialists, innovation experts and eco-innovative cluster organisations from Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK.

The overall objective of INNOWATER is to establish and implement a water innovation partnership that develops and tests new and better innovation support tools and delivery mechanism for innovative SMEs and first user industries. This will be accomplished through: the development and testing of the most promising methods and tools to facilitate technology and knowledge transfer; the promotion of innovative water technologies with first-user SME’s; the development and testing of first-user tools in industry sectors facing water issues; the pro-active involvement of key clusters and industry associations; the development of user-friendly innovation support delivery schemes in form of vouchers and business support programmes. In addition, the public agencies will prepare an exit strategy ensuring that the INNOWATER tools and delivery mechanisms will continue to be scaled up, replicated and used widely.