Nine successful projects announced in Scottish Government CivTech 2.0 programme

Derek Mackay wioth last year's successful CivTech projects  - Image credit: CivTech

Nine successful projects will receive funding to bring their ideas to reality in the next stage of the Scottish Government’s CivTech 2.0 programme, it has been announced.

The tech accelerator programme invites companies to propose solutions to public sector problems.

Unlike typical public sector procurement, these take the form of challenges posed in the form of open questions rather than a tendering process for a specific process.

The challenges are sponsored by public sector bodies and designed to open up public sector work to start-ups and SMEs in particular.

This is the second time the innovative programme – which has received international interest – has been run, after a successful pilot was completed last year.

This time seven challenges were set national and local government, the NHS and other public bodies.

In two of the categories two different projects have been chosen for further funding.

The successful projects were announced yesterday by Finance Secretary Derek Mackay.

At the launch, Peter Ferry of Wallet Services, who had one of the successful projects in last year’s programme, described how the support had helped them.

He said: “For us the journey’s really been about access. It’s been about access to expertise within government…it’s been about access to a network…and I think finally it was about access to finance.”

Carol of Sinclair of NHS NSS, one of the challenge sponsors, described the benefit from the public sector side.

She said: “For me it’s about the public sector engaging with industry minds in a safe environment but also an environment that simulates innovation and public value in equal measure.”

Mackay told Holyrood the project brings “a transformative focus on different ways of working” to the public sector.

He said: “What happened in the past was an issue would be identified or a system would be required, someone would draw up a specification, we would take it to market, it would be procured, it may or may not work, but it was quite a rigid and closed process.

“What this does, it allows entrepreneurs in, it allows innovation, it allows sharing of ideas and information, so that what we then create is a specification that works, with people who can potentially deliver it.