Trial and purchase agreements in the water sector help convert successful trials into adoption. Learn how to structure agreements and overcome procurement barriers.
The water sector has always had a complicated relationship with change. Water infrastructure is critical, and failure carries serious consequences. The regulatory environment tends to reward caution. When an organisation has built its operational culture around reliability, scepticism towards new technology is institutional memory doing its job.
But something has shifted. The pace of change the sector is now being asked to deliver – on leakage, on energy, on water quality, on net zero – means that caution is no longer a neutral position. Standing still carries its own risks now, and they are becoming harder to ignore.
This is the context in which technology trials matter now more than ever. And it’s also the context in which a quiet, persistent failure keeps occurring: most trials that succeed technically never convert into adoption. The technology may have worked, but somewhere between a promising dataset and a signed contract, momentum fizzled.
Earlier this year, we put a direct question to the sponsors and advisors on our advisory board: what is the biggest barrier to technology adoption in your organisation? Without exception, every one of them said the same thing: procurement.
Rather than being a surprise, this confirmed what we hear almost every time we speak to a utility about the Trial Reservoirs Initiative. You can have a technology that works, a vendor ready to deploy it, and a utility that genuinely wants it, but procurement still stops the process in its tracks. This can happen for different reasons, but it is often because nobody has found a clear way through.
This is what we’ve set out to change, which is why we’ve developed a practical guide to Trial and Purchase Agreements. This guide – which will be freely available in the coming weeks – is designed specifically for water utility staff and corporate water users who want to move from successful trial to full deployment. But first – what’s the problem?
The procurement problem at the heart of technology adoption
Standard procurement processes were built around certainty. You identify what you need, you specify it, you go to market, and you award on the basis of who best meets that specification at the right price. That logic works well for established products and services, but it was never designed for a demo or trial. Trialling new solutions is necessarily a process where the outcome is genuinely uncertain. In this process, the commercial relationship needs to flex around a go/no-go decision that hasn’t happened yet.
When these two things collide, something predictable tends to happen. A utility runs a trial, it goes well, and then they initiate a procurement process. At this point, they try to write tender specifications that describe the technology they’ve just seen work, rather than the outcome they need it to deliver. The difference matters enormously. Specifying the method is a bit like saying: buy this brand of paint, in this colour, and apply it to this wall. It tells you what to purchase and what to do, but says nothing about what the wall should look like when it’s done. Specifying the outcome is the reverse: I don’t care how you do it, but this wall needs to be crimson. That opens the process to the market genuinely, giving every vendor a fair basis on which to compete, and crucially means that if something better than what you’ve already seen comes forward, you benefit from knowing about it.
The utilities that navigate this successfully tend to do something that feels counterintuitive at first: they go to market before the trial, not after. By working with the technology vendor to establish the KPIs for the trial first, then drafting tender specifications around the required outcomes, they create a process that is simultaneously open to the market and structured towards adoption.
One public utility we’ve worked with did exactly this. They went out to tender on the basis of outcome specifications, confident that the technology they’d identified was the best fit, and emerged with both a procurement process that met all their legal obligations and confirmation that they had, indeed, found the strongest option available.
For many utilities and corporate water users, doing things in this order feels like a seismic shift. But in practice, once you’ve seen it done, the logic is hard to argue with. Our guide walks through exactly how to make this work in practice, including a real-world case study showing how one public utility did it, step by step.
The agreement that does two jobs at once
The commercial structure at the heart of a well-run trial is called a Trial and Purchase Agreement (T&PA). What makes it empowering is that it governs two things simultaneously: a process that may or may not succeed, and a clearly defined pathway for what happens if it does. This second element is where most agreements fall short, and its absence is often what stops a successful trial in its tracks.
These gaps rarely stay hidden. They resurface when success criteria turn into points of dispute, when vendors deliver technically compliant trials without real commitment, and when purchase obligations are vague enough to walk away from.
One example that recurs more than it should: trials where the agreed standard of success was that the technology would “perform satisfactorily.” That phrase survives into contracts because it feels like a reasonable benchmark in a meeting room. The problem is, it stops feeling reasonable the moment a commercial decision has to be made which is based on it. The vendor believes the criteria have been met… but the utility isn’t certain. Instead of a deployment, this turns into a protracted conversation about what was actually agreed. In a sector that already finds reasons to move slowly, this is often more than enough to kill momentum entirely.
Well-constructed success criteria are quantified, specific, jointly owned, and directly linked to commercial triggers. That precision might feel like it introduces friction early in a relationship, but it’s precisely what removes friction later, and gives both parties a clear, shared basis for the decision that the whole trial was designed to reach.
The vendor challenge that cuts both ways
There’s a dynamic in water sector trials that’s worth reflecting on, because it has consequences that aren’t always visible from the utility or end user side.
Many vendors who come to us have genuinely promising solutions – proven in controlled or smaller-scale settings and ready to demonstrate their value at industrial scale. When a major utility expresses interest in a trial, the response is understandably wholehearted. Vendors will commit significant time, resource, and focus,to making it work, because the prospect of a utility-scale deployment represents everything they’ve been building towards.
What’s less visible is how much that commitment depends on the signal the utility sends about what happens next. Where the post-trial pathway is unclear or the purchase commitment is loosely defined, vendors are often carrying far more of the risk than the agreement reflects. More times than we would like to count, strong technologies don’t fail to perform, they simply run out of runway. The trial proves the concept, but the structure around it doesn’t sustain the vendor long enough to convert that proof into adoption.
Getting the structure right for both sides is what a well-drafted T&PA is designed to do. It’s also why the Trial Reservoirs Initiative requires a defined post-trial commitment plan before any trial begins, alongside a repayable grant to offset vendor mobilisation costs. Across the 20 Trial and Purchase Agreements we’ve now supported to completion, these conditions have been a significant factor in achieving an adoption rate above 70%, – nearly three times the industry average.
Three structures to choose from
Not every trial needs the same commercial architecture, and applying the wrong structure creates problems of its own. Through our work across a wide range of scenarios, we’ve identified three broad archetypes that cover the majority of situations utilities and corporate water users encounter.
The first suits equipment-based trials – sensors, meters, physical hardware – where a clear decision point and a defined unit purchase commitment are the right framework.
The second is designed for complex, high-value deployments where the technology is embedded in critical operations and the relationship needs to be built around staged acceptance and shared risk.
The third applies where the vendor installs at their own cost in exchange for a long-term revenue arrangement – resource recovery, data provision, treated effluent supply – and the trial is validating ongoing capability rather than a one-off purchase.
Critically, none of these archetypes requires utilities to draft bespoke contracts from scratch. The guide we’ve developed shows how to adapt your organisation’s existing standard templates to accommodate trial parameters and is designed to work with your procurement function rather than around it.
Our forthcoming guide to T&PAs
Our team has been busy developing a practical guide to T&PAs for water utility staff and corporate water users, designed for the people who actually have to make these agreements work across innovation, procurement, operations and senior management.
Our forthcoming guide covers the three archetypes in detail, walks through every stage of a trial from pre-engagement to post-trial reporting, and includes working checklists designed to be used directly in your planning process. Alongside it, we’re publishing a real-world case study showing step by step how one public utility navigated their procurement process, delivered a successful trial, and moved into deployment with a process they could stand behind.
The aim is simple: to make trials easier to structure and easier to deliver. There’s no reason every trial should start from scratch, and procurement shouldn’t be the barrier between a technology that works and the end-user that needs it. Both the guide and the case study are built as practical, step-by-step resources that you and your team can use immediately.
If you’re planning a trial, working through a technology demo, or unsure which commercial structure fits your situation, we’d love to hear from you – get in touch at trialreservoir@isleutilities.com.