Making Innovations Stick
December 2008
By Hubert Jenny, Senior Urban Development Specialist, ADB;
Alexis Ngo, Urban Development Specialist, ADB
Innovations are either loved or feared. Individuals or organizations embarking on innovations see them either take root and flourish or dive headlong into a pit of failures. And those affected by the innovation are either better off or unable to cope with the change. When things are going smoothly, why would someone bother to innovate? Where do ideas for innovations come from? How come some succeed but many do not leave the drawing board or the pilot stage?
People see innovations in different ways— a breakthrough, a change, a leap of faith. They also acknowledge an innovation’s close ties with risks; the more radical the innovation, the greater the risk of failure. But what exactly are innovations?
Innovations are new ways of doing things. They could be incremental, radical, or revolutionary changes. These changes could be applied to products, processes, legislation, thinking, institutions, and more. The bottom line with innovations is that they are ideas—brilliant or obtuse, fresh or jaded—successfully applied with a view to positive change, i.e. improving efficiency, productivity, quality, or performance. Of course, the results can go either way so risk always goes with innovations.
Innovation in the water sector mostly comes through technical or technological breakthroughs. There is the application of membranes and nanotechnology to water and wastewater treatment, water reuse and disinfection, the use of helium for tracing nonrevenue water, and the substitution of alternate materials, for instance the use of rubber, plastic or polyethylene sheets instead of a concrete structure for water storage.
But recent years have also seen legal and institutional as well as financial changes.
In 2005, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) introduced innovative financial products that offer governments more flexibility in terms of managing long-term investment partnerships. These include the (i) multitranche financing facility, (ii) sub-sovereign and non-sovereign public sector financing facility, (iii) local currency lending for the public sector, and (iv) refinancing modality.
In 2007, Viet Nam passed Decree 117 for water supply and Decree 88 for wastewater. Both legislations have transformed water from a social good to a business commodity and opened up the entire sector to change.
Top
Very often, a financier would demand to have a solution that is "innovative but proven." By the same token, a client would love to get his hands on a supplier’s cutting edge technology but hesitates about being the “guinea pig.” How does one reconcile the conflict between the desire for the promised gains of an innovation and the safety offered by the status quo?
Attitudes toward risk taking play a big role in implementing innovations. Innovations increase risks at both the implementation and performance levels so they, more often than not, remain at the initial concept stage and cannot be scaled up.
Piloting or experimenting with an innovation before going full blast helps reduce these risks. “Lather, rinse, repeat” is how Harvard Business School author Stefan Thomke simplifies the innovation process, advocating that a process of experimentation, failure, analysis, and yet another round of experimentation can give an innovation a better chance of success.
When Singapore’s Public Utilities Board (PUB) latched on to recycled wastewater as a source of safe drinking water for the country, they didn’t rush things. It took their scientists 30 years of research and experimentation before they perfected the multiple barrier process that made this transformation possible, in the process actually shortening the water cycle. And even when the reclaimed water has passed world standards on safety, PUB continued to test the product in increments, i.e. increasing the volume of reclaimed water they put in the reservoirs from 1% of daily consumption in 2008 to 2.5% by 2011.
Top
It is an unfortunate truth, though, that even with brilliant innovations, failure is often just a few steps away. It helps if decision makers, policy makers, product proponents, or institutions are aware of, and make provisions for, key failure factors (KFF). These could be cultural, technical, or financial.
Scaling up innovative technology is a real challenge since an initial outlay of capital investment is required. At each and every step of the scaling up process— from laboratory through industrial piloting and prototyping— new problems arise with significant cost implications, both on the investment and on operation and maintenance. For example, a laboratory pilot would work with a homogeneous synthetic wastewater, while the industrial pilot would fail with a real sewage influent. Electrical consumption and wear and tear of parts would be very different between the laboratory experiment and the industrial pilot.
Resistance to change because of budget or resource factors is prevalent. It doesn’t help that the procurement rules of multilateral development banks would not allow an innovative yet untested commercial application. For instance, to solve the lack of safe water supply in poor communities, ADB financed a pilot program tapping small piped water providers (SPWPs) in India, the Philippines, and Viet Nam. While the pilot program has yielded positive results— households were immediately connected to the SPWPs and given access to safe and affordable water—the bank has yet to establish a mechanism that will allow it to tap SPWPs on a larger scale.
Lack of marketing also blocks the success of an innovation. Most innovations come from technical breakthroughs where more attention is focused on technical details and less on industrial design and marketing aspects of the innovation. Experts, however, warn that public awareness is an important factor of the innovation process—people are more ready to accept change if they know what it will entail and what’s in it for them.
Top
Even after innovators have taken stock of the KFFs, they should still keep in mind that the driving force behind many an innovation is the “client.” The supplier proposes and the client disposes, so to speak. Most often, innovative solutions are implemented because the traditional solutions do not fit within the client’s budget envelope. This creates a need to think outside the box, and this leads to innovations.
In a nutshell, an environment conducive to innovation in the water and sanitation sector is possible but only with a real partnership among research, industries, operators and clients, where risk would be properly identified, shared and managed among all parties.
Topics 
