The Fourth Industrial Revolution is underway. Whether you call it a new chapter for technology-driven change or the way we live and operate in society now, there’s no going back. It’s the biggest transformation in decades and is setting the tone for the future of public services in the century to come. That’s the view of Daniel Korski, CEO and co-founder of PUBLIC, a technology company that is helping to reimagine and build digitally enabled public services. 

He should know, having worked for over 20 years in public policy and international relations as a special adviser in governments across the world. GovTech came onto the scene much later than other industry-disrupting phenomena, such as Fintech or AdTech. The frustration born out of seeing public services left out of progress made in technology advances led Korski, alongside co-founder and CIO, Alexander de Carvalho, to create PUBLIC. Since then, the picture looks very different, as does the company.  Starting life in 2017 as a venture capitalist investor and startup accelerator dedicated to GovTech, PUBLIC was the first of its kind, helping invest in, back and build startups to win government contracts. Jump to 2022 and PUBLIC delivers those very same contracts. In a transformative 18 months since the onset of Covid-19, PUBLIC has been called upon by the Department for Culture, Media & Sport, the Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy, the Cabinet Office, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Defence, to help them solve policy problems through innovative technology.  Europe's digital transformation During that time, the startup has more than doubled its headcount and made its first foray into healthtech through their own portfolio company – Eva Health – a point-of-care Covid-19 vaccination platform.

Their annual GovTech Summit, hosted in London and The Hague, provided access to some of the most prominent political figures and technological leaders driving Europe’s digital transformation in the public sector. “We’ve been working to champion the GovTech ecosystem from the start, and watching it move into the mainstream means that our vision has moved into a more promising reality,” says Korski.  “When we first started, partnerships between startups and governments were almost unheard of and seemed pretty unrealistic – but now they are a mainstay for governments and policymakers,” he says.  He points to a vast number of GovTech initiatives, programmes, and challenges launched across Europe only since 2018. FastFwd Belgium, GovTech Lab Lithuania, Spain’s IE PublicTech Lab, and France’s Achats Public Innovants to name just a few. Not to mention PUBLIC’s German HQ, where it continues to be a leading actor in the German GovTech landscape leading its first challenge-based programme with the federal state of Hesse.  “We have seen it become a major tech sector in its own right, with Covid-19 fundamentally altering the trajectory of GovTech on the continent," he says.  “We saw it drive the digitisation agenda forward for European governments by years. The best part is, the startup solutions exist, they simply need a seat at the table.” 

Citizen experience Korski sees Covid-19 as a unique period where never before has there been such an unprecedented reliance on the startup ecosystem by the public sector. Digitising public services and using the innovative providers that have emerged in the GovTech sector has been both a significant and positive outcome from an otherwise terrible global crisis, he shares. According to him, the real question is now whether governments will seize the opportunity to embed the changes and build GovTech into one of the most important digital sectors of the economy, for the benefit of citizens who will gain access to better services.  “The private sector has totally transformed people’s expectations of what digital services can and should provide through a relentless focus on user experience,” says Korski. “Citizen experience should sit at the heart of public service design and delivery, rather than being an afterthought. That’s what GovTech today stands for – the process of making government technology more modern, intuitive and user-friendly to meet the needs of people as our society changes to become more technologically driven.  “You only have to look at Iceland, Norway or Denmark, where usage of online public services is more than 90 per cent – that citizen appetite for this quality of access is high.”  For Korski, there is still much work to be done to reach this point. While there is far more openness from public sector officials across Europe toward innovation, not enough change has been made in terms of making entry more inclusive for the startup ecosystem.  Korski’s view is if you were to ask any startup founder what the greatest obstacle they faced was when working with the public sector, the complex nature of procurement systems would crop up almost every time. The format and style of tender re...