Water BOOST Enabling Innovation for Future Ready Cities 2025

Water-BOOST’s third principle highlights the toolkit’s value not only for mapping but for strengthening water innovation ecosystems through comparison and adaptation. By identifying common gaps and transferable enablers across cities, Water- BOOST helps decision-makers move from static diagnosis to targeted action. This section continues that logic – illustrating how cities can first compare ecosystem configurations to identify key focus areas for improvement and then adapt effective mechanisms from other contexts to meet their local needs.From mapping to strategy: Operationalizing Water-BOOST Cities can move from fragmented innovation efforts to coordinated action through systems-based learning and adaptation.4 To initiate this comparative process, Water- BOOST’s structured framework is applied across all six case-study cities, allowing for a consistent analysis of ecosystem configurations. By assessing both the presence of core stakeholder groups and the strength of their enabling connections, the tool can translate qualitative insights into comparable patterns that help cities understand their ecosystems, identify peers, reflect on shared challenges and uncover transferable practices to strengthen enabling environments.For this purpose, stakeholder presence and enabler effectiveness were assessed on a five- level scale – Absent, Limited, Moderate, Strong, Very Strong – each corresponding to a numerical score from 1 to 5. This categorization provides a common language to compare diverse contexts, while the scores were derived from qualitative fieldwork insights, stakeholder interviews and triangulation with secondary sources. The detailed scoring framework and results are provided in Table A1 in the Appendix to this report, and Figure 14 translates these scores into a visual overview of stakeholder presence and strength across the six cities.4.1 Cross-comparison of cities Water-BOOST: Enabling Innovation for Future-Ready Cities 34