Due to the historical, economical and geographical position of the Netherlands, national knowledge institutes are well developed for the supply of internal knowledge. Water boards, public and private research institutes, are working for principals like local and national governments, water construction companies and (inter-)national management agencies. In the last decennia, no large water construction projects have emerged due to the lack of urge for such projects. This resulted in a rather bureaucratic, inefficient and internalized knowledge creation sector.
After our (preliminary) analysis we focus now on the policy recommendations as an answer to our research question as stated in the beginning of this research:

“How should Dutch water management policy makers stimulate the exploitation of Dutch knowledge in the international water management sector?”

Our goal is to create more outward oriented knowledge institutions which are liable to (international) market competition, which can be achieved by means of incentives. This will brake down the inefficiency of most institutions, and will increase towards a more market-conform knowledge demand. Thereby profits need to be generated from the huge investments which took place in the past and potential future investments.

We will try to elaborate on the former by means of the following policy intervention key-issues:

- Generating an institute for the synchronisation of (international) demand and supply.
- Commercialise the applied research sector (management responsible for profitability)
- Keep basic research publicly owned (i.e. Universities).
- Offer funds for innovative behaviour (Innovation platform)
- Create linkages between firms (mainly the focus will be on forward-linkages). This could be achieved by selectively subsidies projects that concern cooperation between multiple firms or/and institutions or/and actors.

The (inter)national legislations are powerful policy measures, which are used for enforcing market competition. The Dutch government has to be cautious though not to stimulate only the national champions, but instead they have to focus on stimulating innovation in general. The governmental intervention possibilities are restricted by means of the European regulations concerning competition matters, which don’t allow governments to protect their national champions (anticompetitive agreement, art. 85 treaty of Rome EU) or abuse their dominant position (art. 86).

As could be seen from the Porter model is that the cultural differences between countries are very important for the development and implementation of new technologies. An important cultural issue in the Netherlands, which has its influence on the water sector, is the shift from the general perception of the population and politicians. The change of the perception we are pointing at here is the general perception towards large technological projects as being prestigious projects (identifying the greatness of a country) towards trying to disguise all the technological influences, like the betuwelijn and the HSL. Another important issue can be found in the difference between for example the Netherlands and the United States with respect to the different thresholds values for interpreting the risk analysis of water products. Both issues have a large influence on the development of the water management sector.

Cultural perceptions cannot be changed over day; therefore the following actions can be taken to influence the process:

- Lobbying with other governments is very important. An advice to the Dutch policy makers would be to extending and exploit political connections more.
- The relevant actors, which are governments and companies, should be acquainted with the possibilities and the advantages that they can get when adopting the technology.