Thoughts on the UK Government £20 million pot for Govtech

Yesterday's budget announcement included a nice £20 million pot for GovTech projects:

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What can the Government do with this? If I were Innovate UK I would be setting up an incubator/accelerator programme for startups to develop solutions based on the new innovation partnership procedure so that both R&D and procurement can be tied together. Take a small percentage of each company going through the programme and ensure the state has a stake in their future, a bit like Mariana Mazzucato has suggested in the Entrepreneurial State.

In fact, I pitched literally this idea to the Welsh Government and Nesta back in 2014 but no dice.

That would be my preferred option but I can think of a simpler alternative based on pure design competitions or challenges which have been done a little bit all over the place with varying degrees of success. Those however hit the skids when it comes down to bridging the gap between the R&D bit and public procurement.

A further alternative would be to look at what CityMart is doing these days with their platform which they call the world's largest directory of solutions for city governments. CityMart were an early horse in the city public procurement challenges.

Personally I quite like that responsibility for the money will sit with Innovate UK and outside traditional procurement hands. Why? Because innovation in procurement needs to be tackled coming from innovation and not from procurement. It needs to be understood as "special" (ie, 'different') from regular or day to day procurement. If you think otherwise, just look at the 'success' of the innovation partnerships so far...