The OECD defines GovTech as the collaboration between the public sector and start-ups, innovators, government “intrapreneurs”, and academia on digital government solutions. It complements existing public sector capability to explore what is possible, experiment with new approaches, and develop scalable solutions. While there is still some confusion with other GovTech definitions and with CivicTech, this is the concept of GovTech on which consensus is building.
Enabling Digital Innovation in Government
The OECD GovTech Policy Framework
OECD Digital Government Studies
Abstract
GovTech brings the public sector together with other sectors to collaborate on innovative digital government solutions. GovTech enables and accelerates the digital transformation of the public sector via an operating model of actors, interactions, and outputs. The definition builds on an evolving dialogue that frames GovTech as the collaboration between the public sector and an innovation ecosystem to deliver better digital solutions for government rather than simply ‘technology in government’. While there is not yet a unified, single definition of GovTech, consensus is building around the OECD’s definition. Finally, while their use can overlap, this chapter will also clarify the distinctions between GovTech and CivicTech.
The OECD defines GovTech as the collaboration between the public sector and start-ups, innovators, government “intrapreneurs”, and academia on digital government solutions. GovTech complements existing public sector capability for agile, user-centric, responsive, and cost-effective processes and services. As such, it can improve public sector agility, facilitate the uptake of digital innovations, and enhance digital government maturity.
The GovTech practice is growing in response to several recent trends, including the:
growth of digital start-ups and social entrepreneurs: a growing number of actors using digital technology – especially with AI, data access and sharing, and open source solutions – to change traditional industries, solve environmental and social issues, and create public value (OECD, 2020[1]).
growing demand: there is strong demand from citizens for more innovative, user-centric, proactive, and seamless digital public services to meet the needs and expectations of users. This is also driving demand within public sector entities for innovative ways to improve their operations and delivery, resulting in a rise in dedicated strategies, funds, and labs for innovation.
domination of large legacy providers: vendor lock-in and large ICT contracts mean that there has been little incentive for suppliers to drive innovation or cost-effectiveness (Filer, 2019[2]). There is also a reliance on conventional contractor-supplier dynamics, which limits collaboration.
investment in competition and market participation: governments leverage public procurement (including GovTech) to also foster the participation of start-ups and local businesses, promote entrepreneurship, and improve their competitiveness globally.
emergence of agile methodologies: work methods originating from software development are becoming standardised as ways to introduce experimentation, iteration and agility to project delivery.
growing financial pressures: especially due to the climate transition, defence, and ageing populations (OECD, 2024[3]).
need to maintain available, responsive, and secure digital services: to continue delivering to citizens and businesses and to ensure that critical data holdings remain accessible and protected.
need to develop digital talent and skills in governments: public administrations struggle to attract, develop, and retain digital talent – especially when in competition with the private sector for specialist roles – as well as when it is appropriate to partner strategically with the market.
This definition establishes GovTech as a key practice to foster innovation in digital government, enabling its practical implementation and highlighting the value it can bring to collaborative governance. It covers all parts of the operating model of GovTech, including the actors, the interactions, and the outputs.
Source: Authors’ own design.
Main GovTech actors
There are three main groups of actors that are critical to the collaborative development of digital solutions: the public sector entities, the users, and the innovators.
Public sector entities
Public sector entities can include national governments, sector ministries, agencies, municipalities, and public schools and hospitals. These organisations ‘own’ the policy or delivery challenge that are the subject of GovTech projects – identifying a problem within its sphere of accountability and actively participating in the development of its solution. Their involvement may include funding, sharing relevant data, offering expertise, and testing solutions. A key part of their involvement is also in providing the leadership to adopt and promote the use of GovTech across public sectors.
Users
The involvement of users is crucial in the development of digital solutions to ensure successful outcomes that meet their needs. Users can include both the citizens and businesses that use the services and the public sector employees that will need to help develop, manage, and even the solutions. As with other approaches to digital transformation, users are engaged in the process to better understand their needs and get insights on how they experience the solution. This enhances the responsiveness, quality, and usability of the new solutions.
Innovators (start-ups, academia and intrapreneurs)
The innovators bring ideas and expertise to help develop digital solutions. They are often start-ups that have been traditionally underrepresented in the government market but can also include more established innovative companies. They can bring innovative approaches and solutions that can better respond to the needs of citizens and the public sector entities. A broader range of collaborators has also emerged amongst the academia and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), as well as from some "state start-ups" within public entities that function as teams of entrepreneurs integrated within the public sector (often called “intrapreneurs”). For example, the French government established ‘beta.gouv.fr’ as an incubation programme to support its public sector in building simple, effective, and user-centred digital solutions by training and teaming up intrapreneurs to innovate internally (beta.gouv.fr, 2024[4]).
Collaborative interactions for GovTech
The collaborative interactions that GovTech innovation entail are characterised by co-creation and experimentation. These interactions aim to transcend traditional supplier-contractor relationships to build new forms or public-private partnerships. Rather than relying solely on detailed terms of reference and technical specifications, the focus is instead on the expected outcomes for the solution and actively involving GovTech actors in the process of building it. The objective is not simply to outsource a solution to a supplier, but rather to complement each other and co-create it. GovTech innovation recognises the need for experimentation, that is, developing digital solutions iteratively and conducting pilots before scaling them up to full implementation. These GovTech interactions can result from:
Public procurement: government contracting enables GovTech collaboration, including via early market engagement, outcomes-based requirements, and agile procurement practices, such as pre-commercial procurement, design contests, innovation partnerships, or open competitions.
Grants and monetary prizes: for challenges in earlier stages where funding may not be readily available, entities can use hackathons and design sprints. However, a public procurement process may still be required if the public sector entity intends to adopt and scale up the solution.
These interactions can also be facilitated by initiatives like ‘demo days’ that promote and advocate for the value of GovTech (see Chapter 4), as well as GovTech incubators or accelerator programmes (see Chapter 3) that help develop the capability and capacity of innovators to participate in GovTech. They can also benefit from the role of multilateral organisations that promote the use of GovTech, build capacity, facilitate opportunities for collaborations, or even help provide funding and investment.
GovTech outputs
The goal of GovTech is to collaborate on the development and implementation of innovative digital government solutions, but its outputs will vary depending on its purpose and its interactions. GovTech has a role in both developing new digital solutions – such as a platform, an app, an algorithm, etc. – but also in the adoption and integration of existing solutions available in the market. Possible outputs could range from a list of ideas, mock-ups, proof-of-concept, pilot projects, or even fully scaled solutions.
While the long-term goal is usually to implement a full-scale solution, it is common for GovTech processes to include intermediate outcomes at earlier stages of development as part of experimentation, iteration, and piloting potential solutions. Some GovTech projects may aim to only produce an idea or proof-of-concept, but the impact of these outputs alone is considerably lower. Finally, there is also potential for GovTech solutions to be scaled up or replicated, which can offer a cost-effective option with limited budget to dedicate to digital government efforts, including for regional, local, or municipal governments.
Overall, the outputs should genuinely enhance the maturity and quality of a country’s digital government by contributing to agile, user-centric, responsive, and cost-effective public processes and services.
GovTech acts as a key enabler of digital government, allowing public sectors to address the key challenges that it faces in collaboration with GovTech actors. It is already being used to:
ensure that digital government investments are cost-effective and deliver their intended outcomes.
offer scalable and replicable solutions to offer more options to public sectors with limited resources.
explore technologies, especially for the development and deployment of AI solutions.
develop solutions that better meet user needs for more people-centred public services.
enhance capability and capacity to address key policy areas, like the green transition.
The public sector can use GovTech to:
explore what is possible: for example, as part of its strategy for AI in the public sector, Spain is intending to use its GobTech Lab to develop pilot projects and AI solutions for use by public sector entities (Government of Spain, 2024[5]). This is because GovTech collaborations are useful scenarios in which to test and validate solutions before committing to the implementation of a full-scale solution. In Luxembourg, its GovTech Lab has continued exchange with the GovTech community on the digitalisation of government, including on digital identity (Ministere de la Digitalisation, 2024[6]).
experiment with new approaches: Colombia’s MiLAB guides public sector officials through a phased process, bringing them together with private sector actors to define their challenge, explore potential solutions, and then work in collaboration to co-create and scale them (OPSI, 2020[7]).
develop scalable solutions: GovTech Poland has been developing innovative mechanisms for the public sector to have a dialogue with users to better understand and meet their needs. The mechanisms were tested in the initial phase, before being scaled out for use across Poland’s public sector (GovTech Polska, 2024[8]).
Furthermore, GovTech reflects the need to create space for strategic partnerships between the public and other sectors to foster the participation of start-ups and small-to-medium-sized enterprises, which helps to address the issue of embedded legacy ICT vendors across government.
While GovTech is an evolving concept, most approaches still centre around four elements: the public sector, innovators, collaboration, and the use of technology. For example, Accenture and Public have focused on “cutting-edge technology solutions developed by various players – notably start-ups, but also medium and large enterprises, non-profits and others— that are transforming public services” (Accenture and Public, 2018[9]).
Some recent industry reports focus on the GovTech partners themselves, suggesting that GovTech is “[c]ompanies (especially SMEs and startups), which use innovative technologies to deliver products to the public sector, which are specifically designed to address its needs” (Anbouba et al., 2020[10]). Other sources highlight also the ‘ecosystem’, stating that “GovTech is an emergent innovation ecosystem in which private-sector start-ups and innovative small and medium enterprises (SMEs) deliver technological products and services, often using new and emerging technologies, to public sector clients” (Filer, 2019[2]). This is an approach shared by other multilateral organisations, such as the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean (Santiso, 2020[11]).
Similar to the OECD, the European Commission’s approach focuses on GovTech as a disruptive process, in which “governments are looking towards the world of start-ups and SMEs for providing products and services for new, creative and innovative solutions, more agile ways of working, and for having more choices beyond the offers of established large IT (service) providers” (Kuziemski et al., 2022[12]).
The European Commission has also reinforced this approach in legislation, with the Interoperable Europe Act including a definition of GovTech as the “technology-based cooperation between public and private sector actors supporting public sector digital transformation” (Official Journal of the European Union, 2023[13]). This approach more closely aligns to what is central to the GovTech labs described later in this paper, including in Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, and Brazil, as well as for the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB, 2021[14]).
While the focus of the approach may differ, there is broad consensus that GovTech is the collaboration between the public sector and non-government actors to deliver better digital solutions for government.
It should be noted that GovTech is also used to refer to ‘government technology’ and the general use of digital technologies in the public sector. For example, the World Bank refers to GovTech as “a whole of government approach to public sector modernisation” that emphasises accessible and citizen-centric public services, a system-wide approach to digital transformation, and more efficient and simple government IT systems (The World Bank, 2023, p. 4[15]). Similarly, ‘government technology’ is the term used by Singapore’s GovTech Agency (GovTech Singapore, 2024[16]) and the World Economic Forum (Mergenthaler and Buckup, 2024[17]).
While GovTech and CivicTech are two terms that have used interchangeably in the past, they should be seen as distinct practices. While both involve collaboration on digital solutions, GovTech is used to develop tools that enhance public sector delivery and CivicTech involves the use of digital technologies to reinforce democracy by enabling the public to be informed, to participate in decision- and policymaking, and to increase governments’ responsiveness and accountability.
Plausibly, the areas of application of GovTech and CivicTech may overlap, creating confusion among practitioners: increasing government responsiveness in service delivery and enhancing citizen participation led by the government (see Figure 1.2). The difference is that GovTech should be understood as being focussed on the internal workings of public sector entities to support their digital transformation, while CivicTech enhances government interactions with the public. For example, the French Government developed Agora – a mobile application for citizens to share their opinions and vote on issues, creating a continuous democratic dialogue that can exist outside of the election cycle (Agora, 2024[18]).
Note: Authors’ own design
References
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