Interviewee: P5, PM RWS
Role: portfolio-manager
Date: —
Interviewer: —
Interview Summary
Portfolio manager role
My role is broadly about making sure innovation within Rijkswaterstaat gets on the map — but not just internally. A big part of my work is getting that organised between stakeholders. That’s also why I work as secretary at TKI Delta Technologie, looking at how you can team up with partners as much as possible, especially in times of financial constraints. If you can create a win-win with knowledge institutions and the business sector, that’s obviously a bonus. My role in all of this is really connecting and accelerating — continuously looking at where the challenges are, who has them, and how we can make a step forward given our limited resources.
Definition of innovation goal of innovation
The distinction between collaboration and steering is important. Collaboration — internally and externally — is about getting an innovation further together. Steering is what you need when collaboration stalls. Those are two different things.
Decision making
When there are different opinions within the organisation, someone needs to have the mandate to say: I’ve heard both sides, and we’re going left. That’s really a thing for us. You genuinely need an owner of an innovation who has the authority to make that call. With the asphalt rejuvenation cream example, the responsible director ran into a problem with a particular unit and simply couldn’t get their capacity — they were stuck with other priorities. That’s why you need things escalated to a high enough level. That’s also the strength of innovation portfolio management: you have a large portfolio, you have to make choices, and you need someone at the top who can be called on when things get stuck. We’re also developing what we call an ‘opgave portfolio’ — a challenge portfolio. The idea is to bring together the top-down strategic priorities and the bottom-up signals from people on the ground who are running into problems right now. If one region keeps hitting a certain issue, and it turns out another region has the same problem, and another part of the organisation does too, then you get a kind of common ground — ‘there’s really something important here, we need to do something with this.’ We try to involve our stakeholders in that too.
Overview of what info
The information I most want to discuss in our monthly meetings comes down to two things: the business case — what is it going to cost and what will it ultimately deliver, especially when resources are limited — and the impact analysis: what does implementing this innovation actually mean for our organisation? Which processes need to be reorganised, what are the legal implications, who needs to be involved? Those are the things that tend to come up around the larger trajectories. We have various inputs for the challengeportfolio — the public helpline where people call with complaints or questions, and our daily internal news digest that tracks how Rijkswaterstaat appeared in the news and how the public reacted. A recent concrete example: a lot of bridges have been struck by ships lately, causing disruptions for both road traffic and shipping. There was a lot of public reaction — can’t something structural be done about this? Internally I found that the same view was shared, and someone at WVL was already thinking about it. We also have a unit that works with students — DOK RWS — so we brought the problem to them to think about creatively from multiple perspectives. That’s how abstract challenges become concrete.
Monitoring progress
We currently have more than 400 innovations in the portfolio. Every six months we ask people for an update to keep the overview current. We started with SharePoint and Excel, but we’re now building a much better application — partly because steering groups got really enthusiastic when they saw what you could do with it. They wanted it back every six months. The new application tracks things like: who submitted it, who is leading it, which partners are involved, what phase it’s in, which Rijkswaterstaat objectives it contributes to, cost-benefit analysis, and when it’s expected to move toward production. It’s primarily for internal use, which is also a deliberate choice. We work a lot with the private sector, and there’s intellectual property involved — companies don’t want everything about what they’re working on to be publicly visible. So at a higher abstraction level we might signal that we’re working on many types of sustainable asphalt, but the 40 specific variants underneath — that stays internal.
Sharing learnings knowledge
There are many collaboration networks out there — Bouwcampus, Next Generation Infrastructure, Topsector Bouw en Infrastructuur — and I think we’d all benefit from mapping what’s being worked on across those programmes and being able to exchange with each other. That’s potentially an interesting opportunity. IP agreements are almost always made at the start of a project — distinguishing what is proprietary and what can be published, and who becomes the owner of certain data. But what I notice in practice is that even when you’ve made those agreements upfront, you have to stay alert throughout the whole process and revisit them regularly as things become more concrete. It’s a continuous point of attention, not just a starting condition. Knowledge sharing reluctance is more of a thing in our sector than in others. You see a clear difference between larger and smaller parties. Larger companies are often happy to show what they’re working on, even at an early stage. Smaller parties — especially startups and real inventors — are often more cautious, afraid that larger parties will run off with their ideas before agreements are in place. In infrastructure that’s particularly complicated because there’s a dependency relationship: we work with large contractors who are used to operating within certain chains. And patents — which work well in other sectors — are often counterproductive for us. If you patent something in infrastructure, you can be fairly certain it will never be applied.
Communications relations within community
My day-to-day visibility into how collaborations are actually progressing is limited. The portfolio managers of specific focus points have more insight into that. If an innovation really stalls or there are serious problems, I usually hear about it through our monthly meetings with the focus points, where we go through the main issues and also look at where there are cross-overs between focus points. But we don’t go very deep on individual innovations every time.
Systematizing collaboration replicating structural approach
One concrete area is the scaling-up process — we’re trying to streamline that so it goes faster. Part of the reason it takes long is legitimate: if you have an asphalt innovation, you need to test it thoroughly for durability before you put it on a road, because otherwise you get safety problems. But sometimes it takes unnecessarily long because of all kinds of hiccups in the process, and that’s something I’m actively working on. We do have a methodology for the innovation process — what we call IUP: innovate, uniformise, and produce. When I arrived, everyone was doing the uniformisation phase in their own way, so we standardised that fairly well. The steering part is still a real point of attention, and we’re trying to address that in the new knowledge and innovation strategy.
Role in the innovation process
The innovation loket — our innovation desk — is the intake point for ideas coming in from the market. They check whether something is a priority and link it to the relevant focus point. On the one hand we’re genuinely happy when companies proactively bring ideas. On the other hand, sometimes we say: lovely that you’re bringing yet another variant of asphalt, but we already have so many in development — not right now. And occasionally a company comes in with something we hadn’t even thought of yet, running ahead of us, and then we get genuinely enthusiastic.
Tooling needs
On the question of what kind of platform or tool could add value: from a Rijkswaterstaat perspective we already have something organised internally, but from my role at TKI Delta Technologie I’m genuinely curious about tools that can support collaboration between different organisations. What I notice is that there are many collaboration networks out there — Bouwcampus, Next Generation Infrastructure, Topsector Bouw en Infrastructuur — and it would be really valuable if you could see what’s being worked on across all of those programmes side by side and exchange between them. That’s where I think there’s a real opportunity. On ecosystem analytics specifically — being able to type in a topic and find out which companies or parties could play a role there — we actually did a pilot with something called the Innovatiespotter, which does exactly that. That might be worth looking into for what you’re building.
Time lost
In terms of finding the right partners for new innovations, that’s more the role of our knowledge field trackers and the people responsible for specific innovation portfolios — like someone who manages the bridges portfolio. They look at what’s already out there. We also have a department for international contacts and a department for knowledge relationships with account managers at TU Delft, TU Eindhoven, Wageningen, TNO, Deltares and others — we ask them what’s already known in a given area. It’s always a bit of a search process, and I’m not sure it’s always done equally well. That’s also where the innovation portfolio is really useful — you can search on a keyword and immediately see everything we’re working on internally. In a large organisation of 10,000 people, you simply don’t know what’s all going on otherwise.