Scaling cross-border innovation
Alexander Holt, Head of Emerging Opportunities and Partnerships within the Scottish Government’s Digital Directorate, speaks to eolas about CivTech, Europe’s first govtech programme, and the lessons learnt in expanding the programme internationally.
Having operated his own digital agency in London, Holt returned to Scotland to manage technological procurement for the Scottish Government as a contractor. “It is this experience of both running a business and procurements that led me to explore different ways of running procurement for government,” he remarks.
Holt set about exploring a new way to collaborate through the CivTech Scotland programme, taking public sector problems or challenges and matching them with entrepreneurial talent. “Rather than going with closed, prescriptive tenders, we ran procurements with open, challenge-based questions,” Holt explains. “We ran that for three years and we had a number of success and lessons learnt from there.”
From this starting point, the CivTech Alliance was founded. “What we found was that CivTech Scotland – because of its leadership in the govtech space as the first govtech programme in Europe and arguably one of the world’s first digital public service accelerators – was able to team up with other governments around the world,” Holt says. The programme has received a succession of international accolades including winning Apolitical’s Global Public Service Team of the Year Award in the Climate Heroes category. It was also selected as one of three programmes from nearly 200 global entries to appear on stage at the Creative Bureaucracy Festival in Berlin in June – the largest public sector innovation show globally – and appears as a case study in the OECD’s latest report on cross-border collaboration.
“The CivTech Alliance was full of like-minded government teams who were setting up their govtech programmes from the United States, Brazil, across Europe, the Middle East, and Australia. What we found was that we were, particularly during the pandemic, at the forefront of technological responses. Throughout 2020, we built up these solid relationships through our weekly video calls, really getting to know people, and that is one of the lessons learnt, that we need these deep relationships. From relationships come trust and from trust comes opportunities.”
Considerations for cross-border collaboration included value propositions for each participant’s own government, for companies seeking involvement with governments, and for any other stakeholders, as well as the legal, contractual, and procurement parameters within which each participant had to work.
“When our group came together, a lot of time was taken to define collaboration, and determine what you can and cannot do within jurisdictions.,” Holt says, adding: “Then of course, there is the cultural aspect; how you build cultures across governments and the innovation ecosystems with which you’re about to engage.”
“The CivTech Alliance was full of like-minded government teams who were setting up their govtech programmes from the United States, Brazil, across Europe, the Middle East, and Australia. What we found was that we were, particularly during the pandemic, at the forefront of technological responses.”
The CivTech Alliance Global Scale Up Programme consisted of countries across Europe, as well as states in the US, Brazil, and Australia. Participating programmes included the 10x Programme for the General Services Administration by the US Government, the US Census Bureau’s Opportunity Project, BrazilLAB, InvestSP and Ideiagov in Brazil, ie Public Tech Lab in Spain, the Technical University of Denmark, GovTech Poland, GovTech Lab Lithuania, Go2Gov in Australia, the Inno Lab in Germany, and Accelerate Estonia.
“We put the proposition together whereby we wanted to get some challenges, so we chose three: teaming up with the United Nations Development Programme on environment resilience; the World Resources Institute on food wastage; and Michelin Scotland Innovation Parc for decarbonising transport,” Holt says.
“From there, we went to the market, and we ran an open call for innovations and an evaluation process.” From 67 applications across 14 countries, 18 companies from nine countries were selected, including Eco Panplas in Brazil, whose plastic recycling business saves 17 billion litres of water for every 500 tonnes of plastic recycled, XDI Systems in Australia, which possesses 85 million assets assessed against eight types of weather conditions and what their future looks like in the context of climate change, and Blue Lobster, a Danish sustainable fisheries platform.
Participation in the programme “was based on expanding their global network, gaining access to the right people, piloting technologies within the alliance, and scaling up their solutions”, Holt says, and access was delivered by the Scots.
Holt estimates over 200 introductions were made over the course of seven weeks, all done virtually. From there, 16 of the 18 companies attended COP26 in Glasgow, where a session was held in the blue zone, as well as three days with ministers and permanent secretaries, organised by the Scottish Government. Success stories from the experience include Brasil Mata Vita securing a $2 million contract, rising to $5 million, with a Brazilian state, and Blue Lobster receiving further help with funding rounds and a company securing a contract with the Lithuanian government.
Concluding, Holt reflects on the lessons learned during this cross-border collaboration and innovation: “When you run a rapid programme like this and you know how hard it is working in your own country with the government and ecosystems, let alone across 10, what does it take to deliver these programmes? We found that there was this entrepreneurial mindset within the teams, this persistence to move forward, this resilience to take the flack, the urgency to get results. With that was a required amount of agility, but also autonomy, a programme such as this which was really just an idea on paper back in February 2021 was laying the track the day before the train was coming down the line.
“Traditionally governments have been operating at that strategic policy level but now with the rise of govtech, we have our own delivery teams inside the governments and what that means is it now raises the possibility for inter-government collaboration at the delivery level. I am very interested in collaborating with governments around challenge series, how can we team up our environment agency and your environment agency to set combined challenges where we go out to the market working with each other on our programmes to attract innovative exportable companies? You will see this whole notion of innovation diplomacy rising to the fore.”
