There has to be a better way. GovTech for digital public services

How does it work? One of the main characteristics is that the budget for such initiatives is limited, but suitable for thinking on a small scale of digital public service solutions, leaving room for scaling at the end. Anyway, there is room for experimentation, and that means failure is part of the activity. But research also shows that a delicate balance must be struck between experimentation and performance. Something’s gotta give.

What exactly are they doing? The European Commission identifies about 6 modes of operation:

• „challenge” activities – the state comes up with a problem and offers a prize for solving it. The solution can be funded and tested directly in ministries or other corners of the public administration, and those who have innovated have a chance to use the public sector infrastructure. What’s good is that the solution is first validated before it is extended to its use
• hackathons – for rapid mobilization of resources and energy and efficient cost-effective solution creation. Hackathons take place over several days, and the complete solution is only modeled, not actually realized, which can lead to the loss of the idea if no concrete intervention is made for its implementation
• accelerator programs, structured training, mentoring, and support programs for developing solutions (usually tech), where teams participate for a limited period of time. At the end of this program, there is a „demo day”, a day when teams present their ideas to potential clients from the public space or investment funds. The problem is that these clients are not required to choose the winning solutions, and of course, for this approach to work, the government needs „a lot of maturity”
• piloting – partnership with a specific company to test a program under well-defined conditions. It also needs openness from the state, but also legal framework for access from an external party. The advantage is that the two entities work closely together, and the exchange of information and collaboration is beneficial for the public authority
• research and development scholarships – awarded by the state following a competition. Winning companies or teams have a limited time to work on a solution, needing to justify the spending of funds to some extent. However, research is often conducted outside a framework of collaboration with the state, and leadership cannot quickly exploit the results from a political perspective because research takes time.
• last but not least – ecosystem creation – the meeting of several experts, companies, people from the public administration – who can offer guidance and expertise. It may be the hardest type of activity to quantify and justify, but it may also be the most significant. Why? Because such an initiative lays the foundation for more collaboration and exchange of ideas and does not focus solely on developing specific solutions but also on creating a much more open organizational culture that is so necessary for public institutions. Because it does not solve a specific problem or have direct results but requires financial resources, it can be difficult to justify.

All of this is already happening in Europe.

• Poland – the laboratory has been operating since 2018, under the direct leadership of the prime minister, has managed to grow relatively quickly, and receives multi-year funding. The set goal was to increase the efficiency of the public sector and contribute to obtaining data on citizens’ needs. What are they doing? Challenges, hackathons, ecosystem creation. They aim to increase SMEs’ interest in creating tools for administration, create a digital marketplace for state solutions, or create a base for training investors.
• Estonia – has been operating since 2019 as an association between the government, the municipality of Tallinn, and Tallinn University of Technology. The types of activities they carry out are ecosystem creation and contests with prizes for working on certain missions – such as mental health (yes, that is a public policy problem for them)
• Scotland – CivTech has been operating since 2017, and its main activity is the challenge competition, catalogued in the Commission’s analysis as an example of good practice replicated in other laboratories. How does it work? The organization sets open challenges to which any organization, team, or even individual can apply with a possible solution. There is an evaluation process for applications, and successful ones go through an exploration phase where they are refined, and the best ones from here go into the accelerator phase, where they will actually be built. They promote themselves as helping to create companies because most of the challenges they publish are universal, beyond jurisdictions. Among the recent challenges: how can technology help identify and prioritize support for people in vulnerable situations, starting with those with energy-related problems? or how can technology help manage infrastructure used by commercial operations in isolated or rural areas?

These are national-level examples, but GovTech is of interest to the European Union, and it is enough to think only of the avalanche of regulations that are coming over us or that are already implemented and that are related to „connecting” different public services from several countries. The main project that will stimulate the growth of the GovTech sector refers to the future regulation for stimulating the development of interoperable services at the EU level. That is? We have a single digital market, being able to order online from another country without any other restrictions, we circulate and use the Internet subscription as if we were already in the country, we can open our Netflix when we are on a city break. Why not have a single space for digital public services (where Union competencies and policies permit, of course)?! Attention, not unique services at the European level, but national services that communicate with each other.

Moreover, just a few weeks ago, the European Commission launched the GovTech Incubator – a collaboration space between ministries, national agencies working for digitalization and digital transformation, the private sector, or research. In fact, it is a consortium made up of over 20 partners – which will develop pilot programs at a transnational level, two of which are focused on information security in cross-border data spaces and support for obtaining social benefits with the help of personal assistants.