Our experience has taught us, time and time again, that the main obstacle is almost never a lack of ideas. More often, what is missing is commitment after the applause.
A few weeks ago, we returned to El Cabrero, a community located in Ciudad Bolívar, Antioquia, Colombia, where one of the entrepreneur teams from our 2024 Hackathon installed a constructed wetland to treat wastewater - —a nature-based solution adapted to the territory’s real conditions. One year later, the system is still operating and has already completed its first maintenance cycle. This would not have been possible without the active participation of the local water utility and the community, who took on specific responsibilities to ensure the continuity of the solution.
This is what open innovation looks like when it truly takes root. And it leads us to ask: why doesn't this happen in every case?
We know that resources are limited and that the demands of day-to-day operations absorb a significant share of service providers' time, staff, and attention. That is a real constraint, and we understand it. Nor do we expect a service provider to finance the entire process on its own or take on disproportionate risks. But we do expect them to get involved, designate the people responsible, take ownership of what was built together, and, if the solution works, be willing to mobilize resources to adopt it and scale it up.
International cooperation and other partners often finance the development and testing of solutions. However, when the time comes to allocate their own resources to maintain, procure, or implement those solutions at a larger scale, many solutions that have already demonstrated their value fail to move forward. A pilot can be successful and still fail to generate lasting change.
That is why commitment cannot be discussed only after the pilot. From the very beginning, there must be a clear conversation about what will happen if the solution works: who will be responsible for operating it, how its continuity will be financed, what mechanisms will enable its procurement, and what the pathway will be for scaling it up. Open innovation is not simply about receiving free technologies to test; it is about building solutions that can be adopted.
The talent exists. The solutions exist. The communities that need better water and sanitation conditions have already waited far too long. There are also service providers and communities demonstrating that it is indeed possible to turn a pilot into a sustainable transformation. When every stakeholder takes responsibility from the outset, by contributing knowledge, time, resources, and decision-making capacity, innovation ceases to be a temporary experience and becomes a solution that endures. And that is when, finally, everyone wins.
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