digital government report
Scaling crossborder innovation
Alexander Holt, Head of Emerging Opportunities and Partnerships within the Scottish Government’s Digital Directorate, speaks to eolas about CivTech, Europe’s first govtech programme, and the lessons learnt in expanding the programme internationally. Having operated his own digital agency in London, Holt returned to Scotland to manage technological procurement for the Scottish Government as a contractor. “It is this experience of both running a business and procurements that led me to explore different ways of running procurement for government,” he remarks.
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Holt set about exploring a new way to collaborate through the CivTech Scotland programme, taking public sector problems or challenges and matching them with entrepreneurial
talent. “Rather than going with closed, prescriptive tenders, we ran procurements with open, challengebased questions,” Holt explains. “We ran that for three years and we had a number of success and lessons learnt from there.” From this starting point, the CivTech Alliance was founded. “What we found was that CivTech Scotland – because of its leadership in the govtech space as the first govtech programme in Europe and arguably one of the world’s first digital public service accelerators – was
