Water BOOST Enabling Innovation for Future Ready Cities 2025

As the Water-BOOST framework is applied across diverse global cities, a more nuanced understanding of enabling environments for water innovation begins to emerge. While each city operates under a unique constellation of institutions, policies and socioeconomic conditions, recurring patterns and structural weaknesses suggest that many of their challenges are shared. Just as importantly, by understanding how stakeholders and enablers are configured across multiple cities, the framework can highlight examples of models that other cities can adapt to address their own specific gaps. This creates a pathway for actionable learning, comparative analysis and strategic adaptation.This section presents two proof-of-concept illustrations that move beyond mapping and diagnosis, illustrating how cities can learn from one another’s enabling mechanisms. These examples do not simply show what is missing but begin to explore how systems connect (or fail to) – and how targeted improvements in those connections can unlock broader innovation potential.4.2 Cross-city reflections and emerging impact areasWater-BOOST presence and effectiveness of enablers across the six case-study cities FIGURE 15 E3 SE2SE1E5E4 E2 E1 SE3 San Francisco E3 SE2SE1E5E4 E2 E1 SE3 Valencia E3 SE2SE1E5E4 E2 E1 SE3 Singapor e E3 SE2SE1E5E4 E2 E1 SE3 Accra E3 SE2SE1E5E4 E2 E1 SE3 Barcelona E3 SE2SE1E5E4 E2 E1 SE3 Bengalaru Source: World Economic Forum Water-BOOST: Enabling Innovation for Future-Ready Cities 36