Water BOOST Enabling Innovation for Future Ready Cities 2025

Fieldwork in six cities helped ground the emerging thinking in global realities. The first explorative fieldwork phase engaged 79 consultees from 40 organizations across four cities (Accra, San Francisco, Singapore and Valencia), using interviews to identify barriers, enablers and structural gaps in local water innovation ecosystems. Subsequent phases focused on validation and refinement. To strengthen the framework’s robustness and cross-contextual applicability, two additional cities (Bengaluru and Barcelona) were included, along with the return to Singapore as one of the original case-study cities. This extended phase garnered insights from an additional 33 organizations and 59 consultees, thereby broadening the diversity of perspectives, geographies and institutional models.Validation also included a workshop co-organized by Imperial College London and the World Economic Forum on World Water Day 2025. The session convened UK-based stakeholders from utilities, innovators, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and government agencies to test the usability of the emerging framework and gather expert feedback. Throughout, feedback loops across all stages – from hypothesis to fieldwork, validation and refinement – enabled iterative adaptation and continuous learning, as reflected in Figure 2. The outcome is a structured, evidence-based and implementation-focused methodology that equips cities and water-sector actors with a tool to map innovation ecosystems, uncover systemic barriers and enablers and co-design actionable strategies for building resilient, future-ready urban water systems. While water challenges differ across regions, a core hypothesis of this work was that cities – despite their diversity – share common barriers and opportunities that shape their capacity for innovation. From a longlist of 20 cities selected for their innovative approaches to building system resilience, six cities were chosen based on four criteria: (1) the presence of emerging innovation ecosystems; (2) diversity in socioeconomic and institutional contexts; (3) exposure to pressing water challenges; and (4) openness to change through cross-sector collaboration or reform.1.4 Case-study cities: A diverse testing ground Geographical distribution of case-study cities FIGURE 3 Source: World Economic ForumExplorative fieldwork Validation fieldwork Potential futur e/related case studiesSan Francisco AccraLos Angeles AustinNew YorkLondon NairobiBengaluruSingapor e Jakarta Sydney Kigali Cape TownBarcelona Valencia São Paulo MontevideoPhoenix El Paso Mexico City Water-BOOST: Enabling Innovation for Future-Ready Cities 11