On 10th of March, PUBLIC had the pleasure of hosting a conversation with more than 100 GovTech enthusiasts from across the Dutch innovation ecosystem. The event was organised around the launch of PUBLIC’s new report - GovTech in The Netherlands - which benchmarks the maturity of the ecosystem and suggests some strategies to support its future growth.
In collaboration with the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations and City of The Hague, PUBLIC has been exploring growth strategies to support the entry of innovative startup technologies into the delivery of public services. The event last week was a wide ranging conversation to debate these proposals with an expert audience, and to co-create new strategies.
As the report shows, the Dutch GovTech ecosystem has many strengths, not least an exciting base of innovative startups and a host of government-backed innovation programmes. Nonetheless, there are areas where it can improve, and there are no doubt exciting times ahead. In our report, we outlined 10 recommendations to support the growth of the ecosystem, which touch on four broad topics: improving procurement, strengthening the market, connecting the ecosystem, and building GovTech skills and culture.
PUBLIC and GovTech NL explored some of these ideas in a 90 minute community discussion - featuring expert contributions from GovTech leaders. For those who missed it, or want a re-cap of the conversation, we have pulled together some of the main themes from the day:
Trust
We started by discussing how to build trust in digital services. Legal and innovation expert, Sandra van Heukelom, opened the conversation by commenting on the importance of trust between all parties in supporting the growth of the GovTech ecosystem: ‘We need trust, to build a bridge between these governmental organisations and these startup communities.’
As Sandra explained, this trust takes several forms: ‘These communities need trust in the ecosystem, but they also need trust in the government, and the technical and legal aspects of this relationship. Without trust in compliance, the government is going to be afraid of implementing their new technologies.’
‘We need trust, to build a bridge between these governmental organisations and these startup communities.’
This was a point echoed by Nitesh Bharosa, GovTech Researcher TU Delft and Research Coordinator at Digicampus: ‘You need more clarity upfront, on the legal requirements, and how startups can engage with institutions in order to develop that trust. This means thinking about how we sign documents in a highly trustworthy way, and how we can exchange data in a highly trustworthy way. This is key to laying a great foundation for startups so they can become trusted components of our government innovation ecosystem.’
Procurement
From trust and transparency, we then moved onto the seemingly intractable problem of procurement. We heard from Karim Bin-humam, from GovTech startup, SkillLab, who echoed the findings of PUBLIC’s report, by pointed out: ‘It is particularly challenging for a company of just three, four or five people to understand what the legal requirements are for national procurement and local procurement requirements. Creating trust through documentation to enable startups to prove compliance in a given procurement procedure is far more challenging for an organisation of less than 10 people.’ For this reason, procurement was a major theme throughout our conversation. Indeed, from our survey of nearly 100 GovTech startups, 70% reported that the procurement process was difficult or very difficult.
‘It is particularly challenging for a company of just three, four or five people to understand national procurement and local procurement requirements’.
On this topic, we were lucky to have the insights of innovation procurement expert Rolf Zeldenrust, from PIANOo, who shared in the view that procurement can be challenging for startups and reflected that there is more than the government can do in the Netherlands - and is already working on - to help startups understand the public sector buying cycle. ‘Governments can make procurement easier by using more understandable tender documents.’ Rolf outlined one particularly exciting innovation in this space: ‘In recent years an initiative from the Ministry of the Interior has tried to compose their tender documents in three pages, and in more understandable language for startups, in order to encourage startups to come up with solutions to their questions.’
Skills
PUBLIC’s report contains some radical proposals for how the government can build GovTech skills and cultures, including through two-way secondment programmes with innovative tech companies.
Cor Jan Jager, Programme Manager for ICT at BZK, stressed the importance of skills in helping the government to become a good client contractor for startups. As he said: ‘If you don't have the knowledge in place, how can the government become a real base for adopting new GovTech technologies without the skills? I think there's a big, big shift that has to be made by the civil servants themselves, they really miss the knowledge to really get new innovation started.’
‘I think there's a big, big shift that has to be made by the civil servants themselves, they really miss the knowledge to really get new innovation started.’
Alongside procurement, skills and culture is another major theme of our report. Whether through secondment from the private or innovation and learning programmes, building a civil service that is comfortable interfacing and experimenting with cutting edge technology will be a critical part of building a leading GovTech sector in The Netherlands.
Coordination and community building
Ras Lalmy, Managing Director, Yes!Delft, stressed the importance of a robust, well-connected ecosystem in supporting the growth of Govtech startups. ‘After the pilot-phase’, he stated, ‘coordination and alignment of initiatives, makes it much easier to scale, especially within municipalities. There are a lot of similar challenges there. Take Startup in Residence; you see similar challenges in various cities, yet there are no crossovers or lessons learned yet, so everybody's reinventing their own wheel, so to speak. Central coordination therefore is something that can really help speed things up.’
Rolf Zeldenrust continued by highlighting the important work PIANOo is already doing in this space. The organisation is ‘going into all local administrations to help them work together to make procurement more uniform and effective: at the expertise centre, we really like to go into the regions to stimulate local public organisations to have more open market consultations and really try to get in touch with startups.’
Open data and systems
The panel then explored the role of open data in building a more interconnected and government-facing innovation landscape. Nitesh Bharosa stressed the importance of ‘taking advantage of open data in order to reorganise current legacy systems, and build more connected government systems’, as part of the development of GovTech. In particular, he noted how Common Ground, which enabled open source data sharing for municipalities, had underpinned a number of innovative GovTech services.
Sandra van Heukelom applied this concept to creation of government-backed test environments, like living labs and hackathons. She noted that presently where the government wants to use open data to build these environments, some departments have been confronted by the fact that their data was stored in an open cloud solution. ‘We need to encourage governmental organisations to bring their test data outside their own security or organisation, in order to create a setting for startups to experiment and configure new solutions.’
‘We need to encourage governmental organisations to bring their test data outside their own security or organisation, in order to create a setting for startups to experiment and configure new solutions.’
Ways forward
We wrapped up the event by asking participants to explore ideas and recommendations to the challenges identified in the first section of the discussion. Some of these proposals built on ideas outlined in PUBLIC’s written report, while others brought altogether new ideas to the table. Some of the most interesting ideas from our panel are quoted and summarised below.
Karim Bin-human:
‘My recommendation would be to consider appointing specific staff within government agencies that are tasked with liaising with the GovTech sector, lubricating both sides of the market a little bit and encouraging working with startups.’
Ras Lalmy:
‘My recommendation would be the creation of an official accreditation from an independent party that shows a startup is qualified to work with government; a stamp of approval, if you like, indicating officially licensed startup suppliers. When startups reach the end of a programme, they should be accredited with proof that they have learned all the specific issues that are required to work in a specific government domain.’
‘a stamp of approval indicating officially licensed startup suppliers’.
Marieke van Putten:
‘There should be increased focus from the government on supporting investment at the Series-A stage in the GovTech space. This is where the biggest funding gap is for GovTech startups. In order to support this investment from government, we will need a variety of instruments on innovation procurement, from R&D procurement to market consultations.’
‘There should be increased focus from the government on supporting investment at the Series-A stage in the GovTech space.’
Cor Jan Jager:
‘We should think about establishing one central entity within government, which has a charter to bring GovTech to the next level over the coming five years. This will require a big bold plan, and vision, a mission, and an execution strategy, and maybe the creation of a Ministry of Digital Localisation, for example, which has a strong mission to bring this forward’.
As the dust settles on this week’s election, the teams at PUBLIC and GovTech NL are looking forward to the continuing growth of the Dutch GovTech market in 2021, and participating in the co-creation of new strategies to support the sector.
Best wishes, we look forward to hearing from you soon,
Yours,
Danny Frietman, Johnny Hugill, Rogier Klimbie, Joe Cardwell