INNOWATER to Enhance Wastewater Solutions

On Friday 11 December the European Commission and the European Water Partnership signed a contract to start the INNOWATER project. INNOWATER, an innovation partnership to promote better innovation support tools and delivery mechanisms in sustainable water and wastewater, will start its activities on February 1st 2010 in The Netherlands, Denmark, Cyprus, Spain and the UK.

One of the most important challenges Europe will face in the 21st Century are its water challenges, which threaten its sustainable development and economic growth and have a large effect on health issues around the continent. Europe has most instruments in place to address the challenges, but their effective implementation is lacking. This fact also clearly holds true for the implementation of new and innovative technologies.

Acknowledgement in Europe is growing that new technologies will have a fundamental role to play in addressing the water challenges. Within Europe a large amount of innovative technologies are developed, but they face difficulties to actually reach the market. This is the gap INNOWATER will address, by establishing and implementing a water innovation partnership that develops and tests new and better innovation support tools and delivery mechanisms for innovative SME's and first user industries.

INNOWATER is a public private innovation partnership of public innovation agencies, water associations and technology specialists, innovation experts and eco-innovative cluster organisations from Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK, coordinated by the EWP. INNOWATER is supported by the European Commission Europe Innova programme.