Mobilizing Innovation to Help save the Great Salt Lake: Imagine H2O Great Salt Lake Water Innovation Hub

The depletion of the Great Salt Lake is one of the most visible water challenges in the American West. 

At the recently convened inaugural Utah Blue Industry Summit, Imagine H2O launched an initiative to help preserve the Lake by closing the gap between technology and adoption: the Imagine H2O Great Salt Lake Water Innovation Hub (IH2O-GSL).

The Summit was hosted by the Sorenson Impact Institute, the Great Salt Lake Alliance, and the Sorenson Impact Foundation.

A New Path to Deployment for the Great Salt Lake

Imagine H2O Great Salt Lake Water Innovation Hub, with support from the Sorenson Impact Foundation, is a locally focused platform connecting Utah’s biggest water challenges with promising solutions from Utah and beyond. IH2O-GSL will source, fund, and deploy technologies against high-impact challenges across the Great Salt Lake Basin.

Since 2009, Imagine H2O has supported more than 270 water startups which have collectively raised more than $1.3B in early-stage investment. Across that work, we’ve watched promising technologies stall out, not for lack of potential, but because deploying something new in water is genuinely hard. Budgets are tight, procurement is slow, and the people keeping farms, utilities, and businesses operating can’t afford an experiment that fails. After years of working with water entrepreneurs and the organizations that adopt their solutions, we have learned that water does not have an innovation problem, it has an adoption problem.

For the Great Salt Lake, accelerating that path from promising technology to proven deployment is increasingly urgent. IH2O-GSL is designed to lower that barrier by pairing vetted technologies with clearly defined local needs, deployment expertise, and catalytic funding through our Water Innovation Pilot Fund.

Building a Water Innovation Network Around the Lake

IH2O-GSL brings water users, innovators, and partners across the Great Salt Lake Basin into a single effort to deliver measurable outcomes. Better tools in the hands of utilities, farmers, irrigation districts, and water managers mean better outcomes for the Basin, for the Lake, and the communities that depend on both. 

• For Utah water users, IH2O-GSL offers access to vetted solutions, deployment expertise, funding, and a broader innovation network, all organized around the challenges that matter most to them.
• For innovators, it creates a pathway to work with water users on well-defined needs and demonstrate what their solutions can deliver in practice. What gets proven here can inform how communities across the West, and beyond, respond to scarcity.
• For funders and partners, the Great Salt Lake offers an opportunity to support credible projects and learn what effective water innovation looks like in one of the world’s most water-stressed regions. 

Success here isn’t counted in technologies identified, startups engaged, or events held. It’s counted in acre-feet delivered to the Lake.

If you have a water challenge, a potential pilot site, a solution worth testing, or an interest in funding this work, we want to hear from you. Help us build the first IH2O-GSL projects for the Great Salt Lake.

Built With Utah, For Utah

We’re grateful to the Sorenson Impact Foundation for the support that made it possible to launch this effort. 

We also thank Bob O’Connor at Wilson Sonsini, who championed the initiative in its earliest stages and will remain actively involved in IH2O-GSL’s local leadership, and Lee Addams, who is stepping in as IH2O-GSL’s Interim Operating Partner.

And thank you to Katie Macc and the team at Sorenson Impact Institute, whose work convening partners and helping shape IH2O-GSL’s direction has been instrumental in getting this initiative underway.

This is the first of several announcements coming from Imagine H2O. More soon.