HOW DO YOU TURN INVENTORS INTO SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEURS?

WaterCampus Leeuwarden helps entrepreneurs and researchers develop their innovations and eventually bring them to market. For genius water technologists, it is often the first real experience with the many facets of entrepreneurship. This is how knowledge is converted into business. Entrepreneurship Manager Ronald Wielinga helps with that. Because the world of startups and scaleups is continuously evolving and knowledge sharing is important, Wielinga talks to interesting people working on similar missions. In this issue of WaterProof: Wielinga interviews Frans Nauta, Programme Director and founder of the Faculty of Impact.

You are driven by innovation in everything you do in business— specifically, cleantech innovation. Can you tell us something about your background?

The answer is simple. My interest in sustainability started when I was a teenager. I considered the environmental issue, along with peace, to be the biggest issue. I decided to study environmental technology in Wageningen. There was no policy direction there at the time, so I switched to public administration at the University of Amsterdam and then created a kind of ‘environmental policy’ study for myself with several professors and lecturers. A few years later, in 1990, I worked in environmental policy with the Municipality of Amsterdam. After two years, I concluded that I was not suited to be a civil servant.

I started a foundation, Nederland Kennisland, a startup focused on stimulating sustainable economic growth. I noticed that startups are often in the best position to introduce new things. In 2014, I founded ClimateLaunchpad, with the mission of solving climate change through startups. It works a bit like the Eurovision Song Contest, but a competition between the best sustainable ideas in countries. It is currently applied in sixty countries, and I am very proud of that.

You have trained hundreds of cleantech startups in dozens of countries worldwide. What do you consider the main challenges for cleantech startups?

Cleantech covers many different markets—environmentalists sometimes forget that. Climatetech is not a market but a policy category. Every market requires its own approach for successful business and has its own dynamics. Sometimes there is a lot of government influence; other times not.

The water market is tricky for entrepreneurs because there isn’t much innovation pressure. The customer experiences clean water as something that always works. The only time it is noticed is when an outage temporarily shuts down power or water supplies. To enter a market as a startup, your customer must be eager for what you have to offer, which is often not the case. The customer’s incentive lies mostly in government regulation. If regulation doesn’t move in the right direction, you are basically dead in the water as a startup. I find this the most difficult component of our work. Demo projects often succeed, but getting the signatures on a procurement contract is very difficult.

We have shaped an entrepreneurship programme around five pillars within the WaterCampus ecosystem. The goal of the ecosystem —and this programme—is to create more startups, grow existing startups and SMEs, and connect companies from outside the ecosystem. What do you consider to be the strongest and weakest points of this ecosystem and programme? What are the weak ones? >

ronald wielinga interviews frans nauta, faculty of impact

> The strongest point is the level of focus. Wetsus, as a starting point, is one of the strongest cases we have in the Netherlands. This could never have succeeded without enterprising leaders like Cees [Buisman, ed.] and Johannes [Boonstra, ed.] and the tremendous amount of energy they put into developing the ecosystem. They are true entrepreneurs in their own right.

I recently asked Cees why he thinks it worked out. He said that there was so much focus that no one actually felt threatened, and I agree. The link with market participants also really makes the WaterCampus ecosystem extraordinary, in my opinion. Its only weakness is its limited critical mass, making it somewhat fragile. It takes decades to build it up, which is impossible without structural funding.

you achieve the intended social and economic impact.

As far as I am concerned, the biggest improvement is not unique to the WaterCampus, but affects all of the Netherlands: start business education earlier. Preferably as early as high school, but certainly at our ROCs, colleges and universities, every student should be introduced to the career option of ‘starting something yourself’. Entrepreneurial behaviour is one of the most valuable skills you can teach someone. Even if it never leads to a startup, that is a side issue because we also need entrepreneurs in governments and large corporations.

First of all, I think it would be good to recruit even more international startups. Recruiting startups from abroad is expensive and timeconsuming, but it should be possible for such a specific niche. Wetsus is truly unique, never underestimate how extraordinary that is. It may feel far away, but for someone from abroad, it is just around the corner from Amsterdam. More foreign startups will create even more buzz, helping the WaterCampus grow and become indispensable. Only then can

You are currently working on the Faculty of Impact, a programme for researchers who want to turn their research into business with impact. Can you tell us more about the initiative and how it differs from existing programmes and initiatives?

In my opinion, the Faculty of Impact should develop into a national support organization for everyone engaged in knowledge valorization in the Netherlands. The great thing is that with the Faculty of Impact, we have the support of all universities, teaching hospitals, colleges and NWO [Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, ed.]. We have a programme for researchers who want to turn their research over the years, frans has worked almost everywhere: from big business to small business, non-profit, government, politics, academia, and in several countries. the consultancy list is even longer. into business with impact. They get two years for that, which includes a salary, lab, office—you name it. During this period, they remain within their research group to retain access to the latest knowledge and can return to their research role if the business does not work out or is not to their liking. We started with the first group of researchers in May 2022. In October, a motion was passed in the Dutch House of Representatives requesting structural funding for the Faculty of Impact from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. We look forward to hearing the minister’s response.

That’s inspiring. We try to do this at WaterCampus Leeuwarden, as well. I often find that researchers don’t have the necessary business competencies. I would like to see a pool of entrepreneurs ready to work with our researchers to build the companies. We are working on this with the University of Groningen, among others, but I still consider this a huge challenge. How would you handle it?

Over the past few years, I have tried all sorts of things to deal with that problem, but I certainly haven’t solved it yet. This is a great mutual problem. I expect to encounter many researchers at the Faculty of Impact who fit that profile. The first thought, of course, is to create a pool of highly experienced entrepreneurs who can focus on the startup’s development for several years. However, I see two problems there. First, this is still a rather small group in the Netherlands. Secondly, extremely rich people are not necessarily the best suited to make a startup a success—if you have enough money, you can abandon ship whenever you want. Making a startup a success requires tremendous perseverance, and preferably no fallback option. water alliance’s entrepreneurship manager ronald wielinga is someone who has earned his stripes in the world of start-ups and scale-ups.

Many older professionals, like myself, would love to get into a startup but lack the assets to last without income for years. They have a mortgage and responsibility for their family. If you want to tap into that group, I think the solution is to fully or partially compensate income for those ‘seniors’. Call it the Executive Founders Facility and use it to guarantee senior professionals an income of, say, sixty per cent of their current income for three years. This creates a situation where getting involved in a startup is much easier. If the startup is a success, they can repay the funding they received; if it fails, they are not up to their ears in debt. I think it would be great to try and shape that facility together!

Magnitude

Water scarcity is a significant and real fear for large parts of the world. In areas experiencing scarcity, minimizing losses in drinking water distribution is essential. Pipelines need to be of good quality, and leaks must be minimized. That is easier said than done, however, and water leaks are a problem of unprecedented magnitude. In some countries, up to 50 per cent of the drinking water produced is lost in the journey through the pipeline to the customer. Something has to be done about it, and that is exactly what HULO, a startup from Leeuwarden and a member of the Water Alliance, is doing.

The Result Of A Friday Afternoon Happy Hour

Robbert Lodewijks sits at a large table in a Leeuwarden office. Behind him, a whiteboard displays a mass of diagrams, drawings, calculations and formulas. It may seem incomprehensible to a layperson, but to Robbert, it represents two years of research and hard work. “It started as a way to extend the Friday afternoon happy hour”, he laughs. “Together with Frank van der Hulst of Acquaint, the company where I started working, we came up with the craziest ideas about ventures and how to move various plans forward. When Acquaint participated in a Wetsus study on water loss from leaks in pipes, there was suddenly something that we believed in strongly.” The research came about thanks to a problem from the drinking water industry, which got the ball rolling.

A New Measurement Method

After thoroughly researching the problem and how it is still being addressed today, they decided to translate the research into a product that could be used as a solution for water companies. “Simply put, there are several sensors in a distribution network for drinking water”, says Lodewijks. “Those sensors have certain historical data, which is used to predict what new data a particular sensor will need to output in the future. However, that does not reflect the whole picture. We build software that uses data from sensors A, B and C to predict what sensor D should display. Instead of making predictions, you see what’s happening in real-time. Because the system looks at how the sensors work together, not how they should respond, our method detects leaks more quickly, and false positives are increasingly ruled out.”

Four Billion Olympic Swimming Pools

The technique is being tested in the Netherlands, and the aim is to eventually deploy it in countries around the equator, in particular. “We are currently validating the product in the Netherlands. We are making it a scalable product to be deployed in areas where this issue is a daily reality.” HULO’s goal is stated on their website: save ten quadrillion litres of water by 2030. That amounts to four billion Olympic-sized pools. As Lodewijks puts it, “Making a sustainable impact is the most important thing for us.”

If HULO has its way, the formulas on the whiteboard will soon be turned into scalable software that will be deployed worldwide to combat water scarcity.

THE ‘BOW TIE’ BETWEEN ACQUAINT AND HULO

HULO works closely with Acquaint, and they are both members of the Water Alliance. Lodewijks likes to describe the cooperation between the two companies using the analogy of a bow tie. “The problem lies in the knot of the bow tie, in the form of leakage. To the left of the knot is Acquaint, an inspection company trying to prevent the leak, while HULO is on the right, trying to find the leak. Acquaint is preventive, and we are reactive. Both sides of the bow tie are crucial and can make a great impact together.”