CivTech Scotland

We started this series of articles about govtech laboratories with one of the first to develop their govtech program in Europe. Scotland launched the program CIVTech Scotland in 2016 and was one of the first countries to begin to solve public administration problems through calls for challenges. For six years now, the program brings together people from the public, private and third sectors to build solutions that they make the world a better place. With this initiative, the Scottish government seeks to improve the efficiency of the public sector and the lives of citizens.

CivTech Scotland uses pre-commercial purchasing, building what they call its “innovation flow” in 6 stages that aims to create digital solutions for public sector problems in a fast and effective way. They work with projects that are very immature, from the ideation phase, and with all kinds of actors, not just startups or scaleups.

Las 6 stages of the innovation flow of CivTech Scotland are:

• Definition of Challenges: CivTech Scotland works with Scottish organizations and institutions to help them turn their problems into specific challenges. The organization that establishes the problem must do so in the form of an open question to stimulate, without conditioning, innovation and new ideas.
• Call for Solutions: After the challenges have been published, solutions are called for. This process is completely open to the public and any company, person or organization that believes they may have a solution is invited to participate. The CivTech team and the sponsors of the challenge analyze each of the ideas presented and choose 6 to move on to the next stage.
• Exploration: The 6 chosen teams prepare their proposals hand in hand with the sponsor of the challenge. During this stage, the teams receive compensation and in the end the winners are chosen after their Pitch final.
• Accelerator: The chosen teams work hand in hand with the sponsor of the challenge to create a prototype or Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in English, that works and that is able to solve the problem. During this stage, teams also receive compensation and advice to work with the public sector. This is the most important part of the innovation flow, as teams acquire knowledge about how to work in this sector where the public and the private meet, and which previously seemed difficult to penetrate.
• MVP & Demo Day: The CivTech Scotland Demonstration Day, solutions are presented to a public, private and third sector audience.
• Pre-marketing: The purpose of the pre-commercial agreement is to help teams finish developing their MVP and turn it into a commercially viable product. If all parties agree to make a pre-commercial agreement, the team must submit a project plan and a proposal, which will be analyzed and open to negotiation. In addition, when the product is commercially viable, the challenge sponsor receives a royalty-free license in perpetuity.

In fact, most of the teams that have been through this Innovation Flow are currently winning contracts in the public and private sectors, thanks to the work and knowledge they acquired with CivTech Scotland. This initiative has been so successful that an alliance was created called CIVTech Alliance in which 17 countries from all over the world are currently participating.

Civtech Scotland currently has an open call called CIVTech 8 which seeks to solve 6 different challenges with the support of more than 14 challenge sponsors. They address issues from community empowerment to environmental and infrastructure issues, representing more than 3.6M pounds in contract opportunities for innovative teams and businesses.

CivTech Scotland is an international reference, and its founder Alexander Holt, one of the great promoters of the govtech space in the world. The great success of Alexander and his team has been to know how to adapt the times and the pre-commercial purchasing process to the reality of innovative ecosystems and their entrepreneurs. This pre-commercial purchasing work joins the work carried out in commercial purchasing since 2010. With a genuine interest in opening up the digital supplier market to digital SMEs and startups, the British government developed a strategy whose main focus was to streamline public purchasing through an approval system called”Digital Marketplace”. But of this Market Place and its Govtech Catalyst Program from the British government we will talk in detail in another article.

Thanks to the open work of CivTech Scotland and its generation of international networks, many of us are learning from their great successes and also from what did not work so well. We leave you a few references in case you want to know more about Scotland's work as a govtech forerunner.

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References

CIVTech Scotland. CIVTech. (n.d.). Retrieved June 14, 2022, from https://www.civtech.scot/

[Picture 1] Latorre, J.I. (2019, December 16). Towards a Quantum World: Technological Evolution in the Next Decade. Time. Retrieved June 14, 2022, from https://www.eltiempo.com/tecnosfera/novedades-tecnologia/como-sera-la-evolucion-tecnologica-para-la-decada-2020-2030-444186

The CIVTECH Alliance. The CivTech Alliance. (n.d.). Retrieved June 14, 2022, from https://www.civtechalliance.org/