The impact of collaboration on innovative projects: a study of Dutch water management

Abstract

In the city of Rotterdam, a dull urban square lies surrounded by schools, businesses and other buildings. This grey and stony square has little recreational value. Although used by pupils from the schools to take a break from their classes, it never really becomes a vibrant environment. Other than an occasional food vendor there is little to do or see in this square. Pedestrians pass by, and despite a work of art embedded in the construction of one of the school buildings, one rarely sees one of these pedestrians pausing to take in the environment. On some days rain falls heavily on this square and its surroundings, sometimes creating water nuisance. The municipality of Rotterdam deals with a wide array of water issues, mostly in terms of water quantity management. Water enters the city through the river Meuse, which can lead to flooding when the water level runs too high. Sea-water levels can rise due to storm surges, possibly leading to dikes being broken through. Furthermore, when heavy rainfall occurs the city suffers from a lack of spaces to collect this water and discharge it to the waterways. Water quantity is therefore a multifaceted ‘enemy’ for Rotterdam, as water risks can be found in the main rivers, the sea, and local precipitation extremes. Every water challenge requires its own approach, and many traditional ways of dealing with the water, such as building and maintaining dikes, cleaning and broadening waterways, and land reclamation, are applied in the Rotterdam area. However, there has been an increasing awareness that traditional Dutch water approaches may not be adequate to deal with future water quantity challenges. This issue is not unique to the Netherlands, as other countries also increasingly see that traditional urban water management systems are ill-equipped to deal with the challenges that are developing (see for instance Brown et al. 2009). This awareness calls for innovative water projects. For the issue of local precipitation extremes the square mentioned above comes into the picture. The question arises: why not transform this dull square into a basin for temporary water storage, and improve the recreational quality of the square simultaneously? This chapter explores this innovative municipal water project based in the Netherlands, in order to investigate the interaction between product design andprocess design in innovation projects. It explores the participation and cooperation processes that realized an innovative idea. It answers the following research questions: What is the impact of collaboration on the attempt to produce innovative solutions for wicked problems, and what lessons can we learn from a local-level case of collaborative innovation in water management? These question will be explored in several steps. In the first section, the case briefly touched upon above is described further. The second section investigates the extent to which we can speak of innovation in this case, and what position the case’s innovation holds in the broader literature on innovation. The third section deals with the first research question by exploring the impact of the collaboration in the case study and what this means for the impact of the project more broadly. In the fourth and last section the aim is to answer the second research question by providing lessons for collaborative innovation projects.