On May 22, a Govtech Forum of Alicante Futura was held at the Water Museum facilities, in a working breakfast format, in which we had the online participation of Idoia Ortiz de Artiñano Goñi, CEO of GOBE. Also present were Javier Morales, Head of NNTT Service of the Alicante City Council, Antonio Sánchez Zaplana, head of Transformation of Aguas de Alicante, Aida Poveda, from the Innovation Department of Aguas de Alicante, David Ivorra, CEO of Lynxview, who in turn acted as representative of AlicanTec.

This session of the AF Govtech Forum was raised around the experiences and success stories of Govtechlab Madrid, a laboratory from which it is intended to bring innovation generated by startups, scaleups and digital SMEs to the challenges of public institutions in Madrid. GOBE is the consulting firm that manages this Lab, in addition to collaborating with the Bizkaia Govtechlab and another Lab that is being developed by the City of Madrid on its own, so the talk of Idoia Ortiz was very interesting to know, learn and be able to promote the development of a technological ecosystem linked to the exercise of Governance and the relationship of startups with public institutions through innovative public procurement.

Idoia Ortiz stressed the need to promote Govtech as an instrument to facilitate the real transformation of public administrations, creating spaces for innovation exchange and promoting new types of procurement that are more adapted to the market, which is not being accessed by administrations on a recurring basis. He also highlighted the need, already raised in Europe, for a standardization of administrations, which would be encouraged by the promotion of Govtech, given that a solution that works for one municipality should certainly work for others.

The creation of innovative ecosystems linked to Govtech should not only be an objective of administrations. Also the creation of an internal culture of fostering innovation and the purchase of solutions from the market, always bearing in mind the departments affected by these solutions, in addition to ICT, procurement and auditing. In this sense, experiences such as those of Govtechlab Madrid point in the direction of creating interdepartmental groups of civil servants as developers of challenges and evaluators of results.

He also stressed the need for the administrations to draw up tenders that favor the participation of small and even micro-companies, as on many occasions the specifications make it impossible for them to participate when very high economic solvencies are requested or a very important weight is given to the economic offer. But he also stressed the need for these companies to be able to overcome the barriers they themselves have to approach public administrations.

A very interesting talk about the state of Govtech in Spain, which undoubtedly brings Alicante closer to the creation of a Govtech Cluster.