Second level of market evaluation is the conduct of the water industry. This industry is mainly steered by technology policy, and is affected by price policies, R&D expenditures, marketing and advertisements. These costs do ad to the environment in which the industrial firms have to perform.
By referring to national champions as Boskalis and Van Oort (former Ballast) we can speak of a very long tradition on water management in the sense of the execution of big dredging projects, coastal constructions and marine infrastructure. It is not hard to compare these dredging and coastal construction companies with civil construction companies as ABM Amstelland, IBC bouw, Ballast Nedam, Hurks etc. Parallel to these constructing companies, the dredging companies do have a tradition in bidding and pricing processes in order to gain orders. A secondary result of this way of pricing is the very low profit percentages that are common in these sectors. Low profits and low biddings ad to a culture of survival strategy, which not ad to a rich environment of high Research and Development expenditures within the companies. Innovation therefore is incremental, and mainly due to product (suppliers) improvements or process improvements gained by knowledge institutes as mentioned within the Structure.

For continuity of work, these large companies do have an international scope for projects and marketing activities. In order to gain large foreign contract for water-management related projects, our national champions have to perform international biddings to compete other large companies.

Industry conduct largely depends on the effort and investments in and by the knowledge institutes like RIVM, TNO, KIWA, Delft Hydraulics, UNESCO-IHE, ILRI and several Universities. Most of these firms and institutes are state owned or government acts at least their exclusive principal. For that reason, these knowledge institutes serve a social function in developing general knowledge for protecting the Netherlands from high water. Most of this knowledge is general and implicit. Attempts should be made in liberalize these knowledge institutes in order to make them more aware of the international market and demand for this valuable knowledge.