Supporting Innovation in Smart Cities through Cascade Funding: the Case of Water Management

Abstract

Despite witnessing an infinitely long list of large infrastructure projects dragging on for longer than expected, bursting the original budget, and negatively impacting stakeholders, there is no common fast-acting cure for the issue. The causes of failure are often associated with either human factors or risk management. One of the potential remedies for ensuring success for infrastructure projects of significant social impact relies on building tight collaborations. These call for experimentation with different mechanisms that have the potential to improve project outcomes and maximise end-user benefits. We consider the potential to contribute to the successes of socially impactful infrastructure projects by piecing together a range of smaller less-related projects that are funded, monitored and supported through the mechanism of cascade funding. With the assumption that the product of combined projects is more impactful than the sum of their contributions, we demonstrate a representative example of several successful use cases that, when combined, enhance the digitalization of water utilities and help maximise the impact of complex multi-faceted issues that are often entangled in large projects.