Guidance

Live question and answer session transcript (26 October 2018)

Published 5 November 2018

Introduction

Hello my name is Nick Tait and I’m the head of the GovTech Catalyst programme. Today, I’m going to do a presentation and we’ll have a Q&A section at the end so please do send your questions during the presentation itself to this email: enquiries-gtc@critical.cabinet-office.gov.uk.

You’ll see this address turn up throughout the presentation to remind you to send your questions to us.

So, today we will do a quick recap on what the GovTech Catalyst is, a review of the process, a quick look at how the challenges are evaluated, what to expect if you are successful, and then as we said, timed questions at the end.

What is the GovTech Catalyst?

The GovTech Catalyst supports public sector organisations to find innovative solutions to operational service and policy delivery challenges. The GovTech Catalyst competitions help the public sector identify and work with cutting edge technology.

The £20 million GovTech fund, awarded via competitions, provides support to define, develop, test and access creative solutions to complex public sector problems.

The GovTech Catalyst supports the public sector to make innovative use of emerging technologies to improve public service efficacy, increase public sector productivity and to grow the UK GovTech sector.

The GovTech Catalyst is a cross-government initiative by HM Treasury, the Cabinet Office, the Government Digital Service, DCMS, Digital Culture Media and Sport, BEIS, Business Energy and Industrial Strategy, and Innovate UK.

Our team in GDS is the delivery arm of the GovTech Catalyst. The GovTech Catalyst is open to all sections of the public sector to apply, including evolved assemblies, local authorities and arm’s length bodies.

Businesses and academic institutions are not eligible to submit challenges to the GovTech Catalyst. However, they can pitch solutions to challenge competitions.

Eligible challenges

So, there should be no readily available market solution. In other words, if you can buy it, it’s not for the GovTech fund. It’s not for things with an obvious route to procurement.

Secondly, the fund is set up to investigate how we can help shape a product or service that meets the need using the emerging technology sector. It does not fund in-house development.

The GovTech Catalyst is set up to work on difficult problems in the public sector. It’s got to be viable for the business and the department and the best value for the public sector.

Lastly, this is about a real problem that affects people widely, that is to say, the solution has to have the potential to scale.

GovTech Catalyst challenge examples

Can I give you some examples? I can, and I’m going to share these slides at fairly high level. I’ll show you all 10 fairly quickly and I’ll give you a more detailed flavour of 3 of them.

The first, how might we identify, analyse and catalogue still images that are posted online?

The second, how might we use emerging technologies to improve tracking of waste?

Thirdly, submitted by Monmouthshire) County Council in Wales (a joint bid from 2 parts of the county council), is how might we combat loneliness by helping our communities to help each other in a digitally and transport deprived area? This is a real problem about people moving to the country and feeling isolated. A need is for social interaction in digitally deprived areas.

The fourth, how might we tackle traffic congestion, using data and emerging technologies?

The fifth, how might we better target local services by using sensors on vehicle fleets?

The sixth, submitted by the Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue service is, how might we improve firefighters’ safety and operational response? This problem is about keeping firefighters safe. It’s very hard for control centres to know where firefighters are in large multi-storey buildings. This makes it difficult for them to navigate to help control the fire, save lives and get out safely. The challenge is hard to solve because the technology has to stand up to very extreme conditions.

The seventh is, how might we make better use of data to guide public sector audits?

The eighth, how might we automatically detect and identify illicit goods during the journey across the border without impacting fluidity of trade?

The ninth, submitted by the department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the better regulation sector is, how might we understand the overlaps between business regulations? Businesses are subject to overlapping regulatory requirements. This places burden on some businesses and acts as a barrier to entry for potential market disrupters. New data analysis could identify areas where these requirements could be streamlined or simplified. The emerging field of RegTech or Regulatory Technology has, to date, been applied mainly to financial services. The idea of this is to broaden it further still.

The tenth is, how might we guarantee prescription continuity when people move between care providers.

Process overview

How does it all work? First, we start with a call for challenges and this is what you’re responding to now. The deadline for your application is Monday 12th November and then a cross-government panel will evaluate all the bids that we receive against criteria. I’ll go into that a bit, in a moment.

The panel will then put forward their recommendations to a cross-government steering board which will then receive the final sign off from all the ministers involved.

The successful 5 challenge owners will be notified on or before the 22nd January. You’ll probably know before the Christmas break if you are one of the successful challenge owners.

The GovTech Catalyst team and Innovate UK will then start to work with the successful five to prepare these challenges to be turned into competitions and then in turn, opened on the Innovation Funding Service website.

Suppliers will then compete by writing proposals and these will be evaluated by Innovate UK assessors, yourselves and us. To be clear, this is not about money for in-house development, it’s to fund suppliers to innovate against your problem.

You’ll then select 5 suppliers to work with you on a 12-week feasibility project. We call this phase 1 and I’ll go into that in a little bit more detail shortly.

Two companies from the first 5 are then selected to continue to develop the product over a year. By the end the aspiration is that there will be a new product or service which has been tested and proven to work. The entire public sector is now in a position where it can buy the service, including yourselves as the customers.

So, this process is pre-commercial procurement and at the end you’ll need to engage your commercial team to buy it.

Here’s a little bit more detail on the 2-phase product.

Phase 1 or the feasibility stage is time to explore the problem phase, the hypothesis, demonstrating your thoughts and your plans. There will be milestones for suppliers to meet and meeting these milestones triggers their payment.

The idea is that by having 5 quite different suppliers doing different things to solve your problem you should be generating a lot of learning and finding out what works and what doesn’t.

Some ideas will fail and they’ll fail fast and carry little risk. Remember, that at the end of phase 1, there will be another evaluation process in which 2 suppliers of your original 5 will be selected to move forward to phase 2.

Phase 2 is about making it real and testing the feasibility of making the product viable. Up to 2 companies are funded with up to £1 million for a year, that is £500,000 per company. Only companies who were involved in phase 1 may be awarded a phase 2 contract.

A competition must have a phase 1 but it may or may not continue to phase 2. It might not continue because the challenge owner can no longer support the project or perhaps we have little confidence in any of the proposed solutions.

Challenge evaluation

How are the challenges evaluated? So, the evaluation is a 2-part process.

Regardless of merit, we first ask is this right for the GovTech Catalyst? Is this about the technology innovation or process innovation? Is this a £1 million size problem? Do we expect to move the needle with £1.25 million worth of cash? Would we get a viable product that can demonstrably meet needs, that other people can then buy?

What we are looking for is demonstration of evidence clear user need within the scope of public policy. An understanding of the market including the approaches that have been tried in the past, in order to demonstrate that there is the opportunity for innovation.

Thirdly, the demonstration of an empowered client size team with sufficient time, money and people available to invest in the solution and the plans to buy the product. You’ll need to manage 5 contracts, make data available to suppliers; essentially have a team in place that can be an intelligent and available client. More on this later because it’s pretty important.

You certainly should have done enough research and exploratory work for a supplier to start working on a number of potential solutions.

If you’re successful

So, what happens if I’m successful? If you are successful, then you have a fair bit of work to do.

In your application you need to be confident that you have a team that can actively support and manage the competition and the projects themselves. This includes digital delivery people, finance people, commercial and procurement people and this outline on the screen right now, are the things that you need to commit to and it should show you why.

If you are the organisation going first, it’s going to be pretty intense work because it falls over Christmas. By the end of January, you need to have prepared all the paperwork Innovate UK need for the launch competition.

This includes things like an invitation to tender. So, it’s a good idea to make your procurement people aware that you are going to be submitting them.

In February, you need to organise a launch event for up to 100 suppliers and work with your internal comms team to think of how to reach the widest possible audience.

In March, your competition will go live and you’ll be answering supplier questions.

In April, your competition will close and you need to have an organised moderation panel to help you evaluate the bids. The short list will be provided by you by Innovate UK’s expert assessors.

In May, you’ll be doing an evaluation and awarding contracts by June. This will be a very busy time.

In July, suppliers will start work and between then and October you need to be working very closely with all 5, ensuring that they have sufficient access to all the things that they need such as users, data, technology, infrastructure and policy experts.

All throughout this, you’ll have check-ins with our team who will answer any questions you have and do everything we can to support you. So, you’re not alone but equally, please don’t underestimate the commitment that needs to be made in order to be successful.

How funding works

How does the money work? So, the GovTech Catalyst fund is held in BEIS as part of a bigger fund, namely the National Productivity and Investment Fund.

If you are successful, you’ll be asked to exchange letters with BEIS to transfer the funding and accounting officer responsibility. This forms the basis of your commitment to spend the money on the project.

In terms of how the money gets to you, it really depends on what type of organisation you are. In Central Government it is fairly simple and the supplementary estimate process for local authorities, we use section 31 grant mechanism and for devolved authority, the money will go via the devolved authority itself to the local authority for its arm. For example, in the Monmouthshire place that we mentioned earlier, the money goes to the Welsh Government Office and then onward to Monmouthshire County Council. The important thing to highlight, is to be clear that the money might not get to you on day one.

Submission deadline

When can I submit my idea? So, round call 3, call for challenges now open, and it closes just on the stroke of midnight on Monday 12th November.

More information

Where can I find out more information? Please see our pages on the GOV.UK website.

Questions and answers

Now, the time that you have all been waiting for, some nice easy questions, if you will. Thank you very much.

Okay, so we’re back in the room and we’ve had a couple of questions.

Can you give us an idea of a good submission please?

What does good look like, is it just submitting responses to the 10 questions?

A good submission should clearly explain a problem, explain the user need the service is trying to meet and demonstrates that this insight has come from an evidence base. A good submission would clearly explain why the solution can’t be found on an existing route to market such as digital outcomes and the specialist framework or G Cloud or why those existing solutions do not meet your needs. Finally, a good submission will demonstrate how the challenge owner, ie, yourselves, will be able to support the challenge should they be successful; the structured ten questions should help you to do that.

Is there a general guide to the length of the answers?

For this round, we have got no restricted word count on the answers but we’d advise that you answer the questions as clearly and as concisely as you can. Typically, we get a fair amount of applications so the more succinct and to the point they are, the better for us as evaluators. But, at the same time, do try to include as much detail so that someone who doesn’t know anything about your problem can easily understand it and try to keep to the point.

Does it need to be a collaborative bid?

This is a good one and you’ll have noticed in the example we gave around Monmouthshire County Council and we pointed out in the presentation that it was two parts of the county council so the question we had is; does it need to be a collaborative bid? The answer is no, it doesn’t. However, if you are a central government policy department, it could be helpful to you to partner with someone on the delivery side. We’ve had 2 winning challenges who were collaborations.

We’ll wait a couple seconds more to see if we get any more questions and then we’ll wrap things up for this afternoon.

Conclusion

We’ve not received any further questions this afternoon, nonetheless, I’m sure you’re going to go away and have a little bit of a think and when questions do bubble up to the front of your mind and you’d like to ask us then please do and please bear in mind that we are going to publish all of the questions and answers that we receive via the email address that I shared with you and those will go live on GOV.UK shortly so that everyone can see them.

So, with that in mind, I would just like to say, thank you from us, the GovTech Catalyst team to all of you listening and taking part and we hope to hear from you very soon.

Thanks very much.