Smart water management is acknowledged as a key component of the solutions to address climate change impact and secure water resources availabilities in the context of Sustainable Development Goals. Over the last decades, digital solutions have become an essential part of water management. Numerous initiatives have been developed to explore hybrid and new AI modeling with concrete approaches such as digital twins. The ambition is to provide water managers with tailored IT solutions that can be implemented in their current management system. These developments raise a wide range of questions in terms of sensors’ approach, interoperable open data models, reference architecture, and cybersecurity that are presented in this chapter. Additionally, IT innovation, as groundbreaking as it may be, requires additional dimensions such as governance, capacity building, and economics to ensure its adoption by water managers. These aspects are also presented in the latest sections of this chapter.

D7.4 describes the innovation and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) management procedures within DWC. It introduces the concepts of Intellectual Property (IP), the types of protection rights as well as the IPR rules in the project. It summarizes the key procedures introduced in the Grant Agreement and Consortium Agreement documents. Finally, it explains the role of the innovation and IPR manager and the detailed activities that will be carried out to foster innovation and secure the protection of our key results. Compared to the previous versions, the IPR repository has been updated.

In the frame of the project Ultimate, eight workshops were conducted by the cross-cutting technology group leaders for water recycling, material recovery and energy recovery as well as in cooperation with the “stakeholder engagement” work package. In these workshops, the concepts of the case studies were discussed at an early stage of the project together with experts from other Horizon2020 projects such as NextGen, Smart-Plant, Run4life, Sea4value, Digital-water.city, Fiware4water, Water2Return and Aquaspice. In addition, the partners from our sister projects B-WaterSmart, Water Mining, Rewaise and Wider Uptake had been invited to share their opinion with us and to identify possible synergies for cooperation.