The Water Europe Marketplace is a versatile platform for networking, business development, discovering and sharing knowledge, and exhibiting achievement in the areas of Water, Energy, and Materials. Through this flexible platform, users may find and share information about innovative economy solutions and systems in the domains Water, Energy and Materials that challenge established thinking and practices around resource use and reuse. It is also a place to get in contact with other stakeholders in the Circular Economy, share ideas, arrange meetings and join forces. The Marketplace was originally created as part of the NextGen project and evolved through the B-WaterSmart and ULTIMATE projects into the Water Europe Marketplace, currently curated by Water Europe.
As in any other marketplace, this is a place where demand meets (and matches) supply by giving access to products and services that come along with their characteristics, powerful capabilities and constraints and by providing a “digital” market for the three key players in the CE to interact: the problem owners – seeking to find the best solutions, the solutions providers – adding a technology or a product to the CE portfolio, and the investors – seeking opportunities to maximize investment revenues.
Within its fundamental capabilities are to enable users to explore and target search for available technologies, tools, products and services, taking advantage of advanced search capabilities or wizards and other techniques such as the recommended system that captures users’ preferences, matches interests and guides them through its content in a structured and efficient way. Taking advantage of the AI techniques, the Marketplace provides personalized and to the point information. With the aim of motivating stakeholders to engage in business endeavors in the CE, the Water Europe Marketplace showcases success stories by highlighting best practices and encapsulating a knowledge base that connects real-world projects and case studies with the technologies, products and services applied within them. Users who are interested can read where, when, and how a successful CE project occurred, under what conditions, what the limitations were, what lessons can be drawn, and whether and to what extent technologies and products are transferrable to their own situation. The advanced match-making embedded functionality aims to boost networking and support project partners, collaborators, clients, suppliers and technology providers to identify each other, connect and work together across the value chain, whereas the event module of the Marketplace facilitates contacts and may also support face-to-face or online meetings, including their organisation. Finally, by hosting startups and new projects, the marketplace is an excellent place to encourage, promote and fund new ideas and innovations.
The Circular Economy, like any other economy, needs a place where suppliers of products and services meet willing buyers – in other words, it needs the Water Europe Marketplace.