Country: Netherlands

The Energy and Resources Factory is a collaborative venture by the Netherlands’ 21 water boards. It is an organization that is focused on turning wastewater into a source of renewable energy and resources.

The South Holland provincial authority is looking for ways to make the energy transition towards carbon neutrality a standard consideration in all its infrastructure management and maintenance activities. The province wants innovation to be a structural part of these activities, which has already produced the ‘N211 generates energy’ and ‘N470 generates energy’ projects.

The former municipality of Molenwaard was the Netherlands’ first local council to operate without a town hall. This innovation came about when three local authorities merged together into one municipality. Despite becoming a much larger municipality they still wanted to stay close to the community. They decided to no longer have a service desk in the traditional sense of the concept. Instead, the local authority goes out into the community and is, therefore, always nearby.

How do we create a safer river delta while at the same time ensuring an attractive living environment? This is the question that the Dutch Directorate-General for Public Works and Water Management (Rijkswaterstaat) sought to answer through its Room for the River program. With this program, the emphasis was shifted from reinforcing dikes to creating more space for the river, with an unprecedented focus on the spatial quality of the whole river delta.

Since 1 January 2013, the regional social services unit for the Drechtsteden area in the Netherlands’ South Holland province has been procuring domestic support based on performance agreements with care providers. By putting performance first, instead of the number of hours of support provided, care providers are incentivized to work more efficiently. The new method comes with benefits for users, for the Drechtsteden region, and for care providers.

The municipality of Zuidhorn (now Westerkwartier) created the Child Package, based on the principles of Blockchain. The Child Package is a scheme intended for children from low-income households. Residents can log in on a website and use a QR-code to pay for child products at participating regional businesses.

In 2016 CBS (Statistics Netherlands) invented the concept of the Urban Data Centres. City data are improved through the combination with national data and data-expertise available at the CBS through which smart, data-driven cities were created.