Water BOOST Enabling Innovation for Future Ready Cities 2025

With political ambition, capital investment and citizen action converging in urban spaces, cities can become high-leverage testing grounds for water solutions. Global momentum for change: Policy and innovation alignment Amid these challenges, there is growing international recognition of the need for coordinated, systems-wide responses. In 2024, the Global Commission on the Economics of Water (GCEW) launched its landmark report11 calling for a fundamental reframing of water as a global common good – emphasizing the whole hydrological cycle as the foundation for human and planetary well-being. Building on this foundation, the World Economic Forum, through its multistakeholder community on water – Water Futures – launched a white paper12 in 2025 to help translate the GCEW’s vision into action by the private sector and public–private collaborations. Among its proposed pathways for action, the policy-innovation nexus is identified as a critical lever, which has also been explored through Uplink’s Aquapreneur Innovation Initiative. This research responds directly to that call – aiming to strengthen the enabling environments that allow innovation ecosystems to emerge, connect and scale across sectors. Such momentum is supported by a renewed institutional focus internationally. The United Nations Water Conference in 2023 – the first in nearly 50 years – set the stage for future global convenings in 2026 and 2028, offering a political window to mainstream water action. Yet momentum alone is not enough. Bridging ambition and implementation requires targeted support for the ecosystems that allow innovation to move from pilots to impact. The challenge of scaling water innovation The water sector is experiencing an unprecedented surge in innovation – from decentralized treatment technologies and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered monitoring to circular resource systems and digital twin modelling. But most innovations struggle to move beyond small-scale pilots. They remain siloed, underfunded or excluded from regulation – unable to scale within the very systems they aim to improve. This disconnect is not due to a lack of creativity or technical capacity – entrepreneurs and researchers are building solutions every day – the problem lies in the absence of enabling environments that can translate potential into progress. Many water start-ups – or aquapreneurs – encounter a “valley of death”: the critical phase where promising technologies stall due to unclear rules, lack of financing or insufficient institutional support. Within the Forum’s UpLink initiative, a global community of aquapreneurs is already emerging, and their ability to thrive will directly depend on how effectively enabling environments are defined and strengthened. Designing enabling environments for water innovation is therefore essential. Scaling innovation requires systemic approaches, not just products. It demands integrated ecosystems that connect utilities, regulators, entrepreneurs, investors, researchers and community actors – not as separate stakeholders, but as co-creators. It requires testbeds, procurement frameworks, regulatory flexibility and risk-sharing models that lower the barriers to adoption. As highlighted by the Organisation for Economic Co- operation and Development (OECD),13 the World Bank14 and GCEW,15 this is not just a technical issue, it is a governance and systems design challenge. Political attention and investment are increasing, but regulatory frameworks and institutional capacity are lagging. Public agencies remain risk-averse and lack a transformative mission.16 Procurement still prioritizes the lowest cost over the highest value, and financing rarely supports early-stage or decentralized solutions. As a result, ecosystems generate ideas but struggle to embed them at scale, particularly in complex urban settings with fragmented governance and legacy infrastructure. This report focuses on bridging that gap. By identifying the systemic enablers that allow innovation to scale – and highlighting where they are weak or absent – it provides a strategic lens for moving from pilots to integrated, city-wide solutions. Report structure This report is structured to explore how enabling environments can be designed and strengthened to accelerate water innovation: Section 1 outlines the urgency of urban water innovation, reviews limitations in existing frameworks and introduces the systems thinking approach and co-design process that underpin this work. Section 2 presents the Water-BOOST framework, explaining its conceptual foundations, core principles and the systems-based methodology used to analyse water innovation ecosystems. Section 3 applies the methodology to six global cities, offering ecosystem mappings, insights and spotlight cases drawn from field research. Section 4 explores how the framework can be operationalized, including cross-city comparisons, digital prototype development and strategic pathways for scaling and application. The report closes with a brief reflection and call to action. Water-BOOST: Enabling Innovation for Future-Ready Cities 7