Interviewee: P4, more F
Role: portfolio-manager
Date: —
Interviewer: —
Interview Summary
Portfolio manager role
What also plays a significant role is the informal influence side. If a good innovation gets stuck in a permits department because it doesn’t fit the format neatly, I can simply call the manager directly and say: this needs to happen, something seems to be going wrong. That person speaks to the right department head and it moves forward. That’s something you can’t easily do from within a municipality yourself. I genuinely think that in a large number of our successes, it’s exactly these kinds of things that made it happen. That’s hard to capture in a model, but it’s very real. a large part of what we do is that process of concretisation. The networking element is equally important — connecting people who want to learn from someone who has already done something. Knowledge is very fragmented, and we certainly don’t have all the answers. But I do dare to claim that we often know better than the average municipal employee what has already been investigated, done, applied, and learned.
Definition of innovation goal of innovation
What we saw very early on is that validation in a lab, a computer model, or on paper is simply not enough for public end users like water authorities and municipalities. They need to see things work in reality. That’s why we developed what we call a stepping-stone model — physical experimentation environments that bridge the gap between theory and real pilots. The translation piece is something the public sector is just not very good at. Policy documents are full of ambitious statements — ‘innovation is high on our agenda’, ‘30% of new buildings will be climate-adaptive’, ‘all water authorities will be CO2 neutral by 2050’ — but what does any of that actually mean in practice? I’ve worked with one water authority for 10 years that has had literally one innovation advisor for two days a week and never had a budget. And yet their first line is ‘innovation is high on our agenda.’ That just doesn’t match. With climate adaptation targets, nobody asks: where are we now, what does 30% even mean, how do you measure it? Everyone just nods along. If I said I’m going to run a marathon in April, you’d immediately know what that means for your daily life. But these kinds of policy ambitions — they require everyone to make different choices every day, and that translation simply never gets made.
Decision making
Over the years the themes have shifted from flooding to drought to water quality, and most recently biodiversity came up — the province came to us after an EU directive and asked what we could test. We don’t decide on those thematic additions alone. I put them on the agenda of the steering group, where dike managers, directors, and aldermen sit, and we discuss together whether it fits what we can do here and whether we’re the right party for it.
Overview of what info
We do track our network carefully — in Excel — including all the scale-ups of our innovations across the Netherlands. We report on those annually to the steering group. Right now we have more than 160 locations across the country where an innovation that started here is in use. We find that important to document.
Monitoring progress
No response recorded.
Sharing learnings knowledge
we track the failures equally carefully — things that went wrong in practice are just as instructive. A green parking area once failed completely because a contractor left a material outside that must not get wet. It rained, nobody understood why it wasn’t working, and everyone was angry. These are things you want documented, because the lesson is very practical and not obvious. Failures are just as important to share as successes — and we share them far too little in general.
Communications relations within community
In terms of how we collaborate within the community, we have a core group with representatives from all our partner organisations — water authorities and municipalities. Each partner sends a diverse mix: a maintenance manager, a policy advisor for climate adaptation, and so on. That group comes together physically four times a year, very often at the Green Village to see new things, but sometimes also at a partner’s location or alongside an event. Then we have the steering group, which meets twice a year at management level to discuss progress and put forward new themes. On top of that I have very frequent contact with every partner — daily, really. I don’t think a week goes by without being in touch with someone from Delfland, Den Haag, the province, or elsewhere. And they come here often too — different departments visiting to look around the test garden. We’ve also built some of that contact into structural routines. so I also just cycle over every now and then — you need that to hear what’s really happening. Because if you wait for them to come to you with a question, you can sometimes wait a long time.
Systematizing collaboration replicating structural approach
The innovation process rarely follows a neat funnel — it’s much more often chaotic than a tidy step one through ten. What I think is really decisive is knowing how to find the right people in the network. The people who enjoy working with us at a municipality or water authority are already a particular type — people who care about sustainability, about innovation, about change. And we tend to gather the people who dare to take action and who will bring others along within their own organisation. There is a certain repetitiveness to what we do, even as themes change. The whole cycle of scouting, testing, monitoring, sharing, asking for feedback, developing further, and setting up first pilots — we ran that entire cycle for flooding, and we’re now essentially running it again for biodiversity in the city. The structure is a bit the same — but on a different theme with completely different people.
Role in the innovation process
The Green Village is that: a real mini village right on our campus, with streets, squares, buildings, permanent residents, an energy grid, a heat network, solar panels — everything. But with a fence around it. Inside that fence we have a special status that lets us experiment with building techniques, materials, paving, water capture — things that aren’t allowed elsewhere. And we monitor everything carefully, because at heart we are engineers and scientists. What that setup allows us to do is involve water authorities and municipalities very early in the process. When someone comes with a new type of nature-friendly bank, we share the plan with them immediately and ask for their initial concerns. Then we install it, monitor it, and come back after a year or two with results. After more than 10 years we’ve gotten much better at understanding how municipalities and water authorities work and what you need to think about when you want solutions actually implemented.
Tooling needs
In terms of documentation and visibility, we go well beyond Excel sheets and heads. We produce a programme report every year with photos, figures on planned versus actual scale-ups, visitor numbers, student involvement, and an overview of all new innovations. We also make a scale-up map showing where all those installations are across the Netherlands — and often the people we speak to don’t even know they’re already doing all those things. We share infographics of our partner network, our targets, research collaborations, knowledge sessions — all of that goes out to partners. Making that visible is important to us.
Time lost
No response recorded.