Taking our govtech experience across the pond: landing in Brazil

On May 4th 2022 we landed in Porto Alegre, Brazil to bring two govtech panels and experts to the recently launched South Summit Brazil, the newest edition in LATAM of the largest innovation event in Southern Europe.

It was a blast:

• The total audience was over 20 thousand people;
• We received participants from around 50 countries;
• Through the event’s application, more than 40 thousand contacts were made;
• The combined transmissions reached more than 35 million homes;
• More than 7,500 representatives of international companies attended the event;
• More than 2,500 entrepreneurs participated in the South Summit Brazil;
• There were more than 450 investors, including 20 international funds with an investment portfolio that totalled more than $65 billion for the state of Rio Grande do Sul;
• More than 500 speakers, 50 of them international;
• 30% were women;
• During the startup competition, we received entries from more than 1,000 innovative projects from 76 different countries. The big winners were: YOURS bank; SoluBio (Sustainable), PixForce (Innovative), Brilliantly (Scalable), Aprix (Team).

“Regional governments piloting with startups: the successful case studies of Madrid and São Paulo”

Rocío Suanzes, Ecosystem Builder at IE PublicTech Lab had a very enriching conversation with Felipe Massami, expert at IdeiaGov, in which they both shared the experiences of their Labs bringing startups to the municipalities and helping them pilot their solutions.

Rocío shared the successful case of Govtechlab Madrid, the first govtech innovation program in Spain in which we have worked with 40 startups and more than 24 municipalities on how to work closer together, and Felipe gave the audience more details about the program running in Sao Paulo.

Both pioneer programs focus on fostering govtech ecosystems as part of their strategies, and have a very clear problem to tackle:

The huge amount of innovation not reaching public institutions, and the missed opportunity to offer better solutions and services to citizens.

Public institutions’ demand for technology is informed by the known supply of traditional technology solution providers. If only a small portion of the public sector technology purchase could be channeled towards small and medium-sized companies, a great space of opportunity would be generated for the majority of innovative companies.

When this open innovation methodology is implemented, governments make a specific problem publicly visible, channels are opened, and active measures are taken so that the best solutions from a much more competitive and diverse offer arrive.

“The key ingredient for a successful transformation in government: working with startups”

Sofia Silva, moderator and Project Lead at IE PublicTech Lab, kicked off the panel asking the audience to imagine:

Firstly, a government working like a startup. Being data driven, obsessed with delivering the best to their users, agile, iterative, innovative, technological…

And secondly, to imagine the innovative solutions of startups in health, transport, climate and many other areas, impacting the same amount of people as governments impact.

I think we can all agree that the outlook looks good, and the good news is that it has a bit of reality in it. The panel aimed to answer why startups are so key to transformation in government, based on the experiences of govtech experts Marcelo Facchina, Govtech lead in Brasil for the Development Bank of Latin America, CAF; Gloria Ramírez Alzate, Operations Lead at Innpulsa Colombia and Luciano Crisafulli, Director at CORLab.

Some of the highlights included:

• If having a national strategy helps promote this kind of work in municipalities or cities, to which the answer was that they are helpful, given that it articulates an agenda and activates investments.
• If municipal govtech activities work best than national ones, to which the experts said that depending on the goal ones may be better than the others, but highlighted that municipalities’ proximity to citizens is usually a beneficial for problems to be identified and govtech challenges to be launched.
• A statement on how “govtech is a way of doing policy”.

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