P1: H., researcher
it’s important to have an approach upfront. you can explain that it’s smart to connect to BOMOS, which is an open standard approach offered by Logius. So BOMOS can be used as an approach—but it’s still a very high-level one. if you procure every time, you lose all the knowledge you had. the single-budget approach is extremely helpful to stimulate innovation— suggesting a structural financial model that enables continuity rather than restarting each time.
P2: L., more F not really PM
At a higher level, we manage a project portfolio with four phases: signaling, exploring, accelerating, and then either execution or saying goodbye. In terms of tooling, we’re actually quite limited. A lot of knowledge sits in people’s heads. We have a CRM system, but it doesn’t really work well. We track which companies are linked to which projects, but broader ecosystem mapping is hard. We sometimes commission a sector analysis from an external party, but we don’t have the software or the structural setup to do proper network mapping ourselves. We’re still too much organized as an hours factory — it all sits on skills and relationships, and we miss that broader infrastructure.
P4: L., more F
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.
P5: S., PM RWS
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.
P6: M., PM Novum
Novum works according to a fixed methodology (design thinking + lean startup) with defined phases, but applies it deliberately with flexibility — every project is bespoke. The PM actively monitors whether new projects fit within that structure, and exceptions are only made with well-founded reasons; when such exceptions recur, they become a new “flavour” in the portfolio (such as the AI experiment track).