C22 participated at 
the Aquatech Innovation Forum and Aquatech Amsterdam last week to engage with the key actors in the water ecosystem. Seeing the program as an ideal place to share ideas with like-minded & purpose-driven water experts, I joined the Innovation Forum on day 1. It started with a test between the ‘old generation’ and the Millennials…. Of course the millennials were more innovative and won the test.
After a fun game several serious theses were discussed one of them was: ‘Failure is an inevitable part of the creation process. Change is only possible when there is a crisis. Better to be the disruptor than the disrupted’. Annelies stood up and pointed out that change also starts when more awareness is created around a topic such as the water crisis. For example look at the change ‘plastic’ is going through now the public is so aware of it. Will Sarni came on top of this with a great quote: ‘You need the public sector to scale and entrepreneurs to fail’. The forum in general received many valuable statements from key water actors like Benjamin Tam from Isle Utilities and Rik Thijssen of Vitens and Dragan Savric Feng from KWR. Most people in the room agreed that we need to break down the silo’s in water and more collaboration & knowledge sharing is needed.
If I can give one critical note it would be the lack of presence of stakeholders outside the water sphere. Inspiring people such as Rebekah Eggers (Business Partner IBM) are needed to accelerate the future of the water ecosystem…..As C22 we believe in a network powered ecosystem to catalyse investment to solve global water challenges. Bringing organizations together inside and outside water to enable innovation, acquire capital and create awareness. Aquatech 2019 was definitely a great platform to further strengthen the network powered ecosystem and movement which c22 has developed with partners 98 Sparks and PureTerra Ventures under the name WaterSpark….. more about this later.