A conversation with Arūnė Matelytė, Co-Founder of GovTech Lithuania
Edition #56 GovTech Lithuania's manager talks innovation challenges, digital upskilling, and global GovTech alliances...
When I sit down with Arune Matelyte - the Co-founder and Head of Lithuania’s GovTech Lab - she has just returned to her role after a 6-month stint at the OECD, contributing her experiences within Lithuania’s Innovation Agency to supporting governments in better working with the private sector to scale their digital offering.
She was – and remains – perhaps the perfect person for the job. Her team of 7 at the GovTech Lab has made significant strides over the past few years in building her country’s digital government ecosystem, running more than 100 challenge programs to connect public and private sector innovators and hosting thousands of people in Vilnius for GovTech Leaders summits. It is testament to the agency’s international ambitions that – even with such limited resources – there is a full-time staff member responsible for international collaboration, with Lithuania one of the founding members of a global network of like-minded innovation partners: the Global GovTech alliance.
The GovTech Leaders summit is just one of GovTech Lab Lithuania’s offerings (Source)
We begin by talking about Matelyte’s philosophy on international collaboration. She tells me about the formation of the Global GovTech Alliance – a network that now has 25 members across 4 continents – which arose serendipitously from an event held in Scotland in early 2020 by a collection of government agencies working on challenge innovation programs (more on this later). When these departments were suddenly thrust into the unknown by the onset of Covid-19, the teams joined forces to navigate the challenge together.
“It was originally a form of therapy”, Matelyte tells me, and the fact that it managed to evolve beyond weekly video meetings into a forum for multilateral innovation challenges is simply “because people spent time on it, and allowed it to organically scale”. The key is authenticity. “Collaboration shouldn’t be top down”, she says, “to make it work you need bottom-up working relationships, where people want to work together”.
Today, the alliance is best known for its Global Scale Up Programs – award-winning cross-border efforts to source, surface and scale climate tech solutions for public sector applications. Through GSUP, companies are invited to submit responses to challenge tenders, before successful applicants go on a “scale-up safari” of engagement sessions. There, policymakers and procurers, innovators and investors spend time in workshops with each country in the alliance for 2-3 days to build a globally informed offering. Solutions have been showcased at COP26 and COP27, with hundreds of introductions made between participating companies and potential partners.
Collaboration on the GSUP program has no doubt been informed by, just as much as it has informed, GovTech Lab’s challenge programs in Lithuania, which have become something of a gold standard. In simple terms, each program attempts to reimagine the usual tender process by having private companies pitch to solve open-ended “challenges” focused on a problem rather than a technical solution. Once the best ideas are selected, the government then co-creates the solution with the private company through a 3-month structured accelerator, culminating in a Demo Day.
“It is an attempt to reinvent the traditional process, which doesn’t attract unconventional ideas”, Matelyte tells me. “We don’t necessarily look for new companies to enter the ecosystem, but new ways of thinking – within our challenges, companies can participate and build things much better without the usual constraints of procurement”. For the first time this year, the challenges have been broadened to admit companies with products already in the market - not just those ideas that would need to be co-created from scratch - and the program has started to provide funding opportunities for the companies chosen.
It has been just over four years since the first challenges were announced, not much time for any of the participants to dramatically scale, but there have already been some indicators of the program’s successes. The Communications Regulatory Authority’s (RRT’s) clean internet challenge, for example, arose out of difficulties in finding and reporting child abuse material online. An AI-powered web crawler, co-created through one of GovTech Lab’s accelerators, scanned 288k+ websites in its first 2 months of use, identifying 19 websites as violating national or EU laws and leading to 8 police reports being filed. By way of comparison, the previous year had seen voluntary reports from internet users result in just 80 police reports in total.
Returning from the OECD, Matelye is energized with new ideas on how to improve the Lab’s offering: “what to lobby for; what the main things we are lacking are; and with it a reaffirmed notion of the place of GovTech in realizing digital government strategy”. When I push her on these ideas, she returns to that same notion of creating the best environment for collaboration, talking about the relationship between the supply and demand of GovTech solutions between the public and private sector.
In its early days, with limited resources, the GovTech Lab had focused on stimulating demand by issuing challenges, with the idea that the supply would naturally follow. But as it has grown, Matelyte says, there has been increased opportunity to think about stimulating partnerships between government and innovative companies more broadly.
Here, there is a tension between complex day-to-day work and “the big picture and what else is needed in the ecosystem”. In an online post to mark her return to the Lithuanian government, Matelyte compared the digital government ecosystem to “a symphony” whose “triumph hinges on a blend of many government policies – from digitalization and public sector innovation to procurement, entrepreneurship, and open data”. As for the challenges, “it is a playground, but it is a playground with a purpose”.
As we come to the end of our interview, I ask Arune about her plans for her team going forward. “I am settled on the opinion that the programs are the main value add” she says, but her time at the OECD has given her pause to think about some of the systemic challenges facing digital government: procurement, entrepreneurship, and engaging with SMEs. Having just launched a new challenge series - along with an innovation academy upskilling core change actors in the public sector that saw a 5-to-1 competition for places - there is clearly a lot on the GovTech Lab’s plate. But we certainly shouldn’t be too surprised if we began to see Lithuania start to set the agenda on those topics too, just as they have become one of the go-to names for innovation challenges.