Collaboration and partnership: let’s work together

Mark Elliott, CivTech Programme Director

It's great news – the Scottish GovTech Cluster is being launched. It’s long been in the making, and its launch is in many ways all the sweeter for that – and more powerful as a proposition.

The Cluster’s targets are to build development, innovation and collaboration across organisations, teams, academia, and other institutes across Scotland, and to take the Scottish GovTech offer to the world. There’s much to play for here: with a reputation as one of the leaders in the field, there’s a worldwide market that’s estimated to reach $800 billion per year by next year.

Together, we can create a network where interdependent firms, institutions and production chain customers can connect, collaborate, innovate, exchange knowledge and build lasting business relationships. The GovTech Cluster can bring together different actors to ally their interests and work together for everyone’s greater good. 

Being part of an effective cluster is both beneficial for technological innovation and for individual business development: bringing attention to the potential of a particular area of activity can generate commitment, support and all-important funding. And that, applied to the cluster activity, is a virtuous circle. Investment grows, companies grow and prosper to create more economic benefit, and so drive ever greater investment. 

Scotland already has a track record in developing effective clusters, and we believe that we can add value to this process by drawing on CivTech’s experience in developing successful clusters. 

We know that Scotland offers great potential for the GovTech Cluster as long-term alliances could be knitted together. The cluster will connect companies working on GovTech products and services, Scotland’s unparalleled universities, great research institutes and centres of excellence. It will unite CivTech along with its numerous partnership organisations, the Scottish Government and public sector, and a vibrant home market. 

The GovTech Cluster is built into CivTech’s Full Business Case approved by Ministers in May 2022. Finding the right way of launching it, with CivTech able to play a full role but not being an overbearing part of the make-up took a little thought and some time to get right.

But we’ve now done this, and we can truly say that this has the potential to really take GovTech in Scotland - with CivTech – onto a new level. We should celebrate the progress – and I’d ask everyone – absolutely every individual, team, business, organisation or institution with an interest in GovTech – to join the cluster and take a full part in its development.

If you’re in GovTech, it’s your cluster!

The Scottish Government has long been committed to harnessing the potential of GovTech to improve service delivery, increase efficiency and enhance transparency and accountability. The Scottish Business Networks (SBN) appointment as the Cluster Driver Organisation will play a crucial role in achieving these goals and their expertise will help Scotland make the most of the opportunities presented by the rapidly growing GovTech market.

Underlying its launch is something that CivTech has been increasingly focused on over the past three years. It’s the fruits of genuine collaboration and partnership working…

Recently I read this…

‘There was a very clever evolutionary biologist at the beginning of the last century, Peter Kropotkin, who said that when there are fewer resources, and the environment is changing, then cooperation is vastly more efficient [than competition]. This is an important teaching for us today, because we are entering a period of reduction of resources and the environment is changing because of global warming.’

This resonated, and not just in the context of climate change and natural resources.

For me it chimed with our position as a small nation (as all nations havewith challenges on many fronts and a limited set of resources with which to tackle them.

And I’ll bet few would disagree that our economic environment is changing, and we are in a period of reduced resources.

So, if we’re to be mindful of Kropotkin’s point, we should be cooperating. Which gets me to the point: if we acknowledge that cooperation, genuine partnership working and collaboration are vastly more efficient than competition, why is it that we are generally so mediocre at these things?

Yes, I know we’ll often tout our collaborative nature, and it often comes up in missives about what’s great about Scotland, but behind closed doors people are more frank and acknowledge the often severe shortcomings. Because the brutal truth is only someone who was born and bred in Scotland and who has never crossed its border be it land, sea or air would ever claim were collaborative world leaders.

And there’s another danger in fragmented, uncoordinated activity. Along with our restricted resources, we are playing on a restricted playing field. Scotland is simply not that big, and too many people with limited resources trampling across the same ground will inevitably create a ‘tragedy of the commons.’

Too many organisations - from the smallest teams to the largest enterprises - are so focused on keeping hold of what they have that they lose sight of just what might happen if their grip loosened just a little so a hand can be extended to others.

A recent report itemised all the innovation initiatives in Scotland. It ran to well over a hundred and fifty pages. And for me it begged a question: how many have reached out to each other and explore what might happen if they worked together to deliver on common goals?

And all this is why for the past four years at CivTech we’ve been putting together meaningful partnerships with genuine collaboration at their heart. Organisations that ‘got it’ and came on board early include Censis, NatureScot, Interface and South of Scotland Enterprise (SOSE). They’re led by people like Paul Winstanley, Chief Executive of Censis, and Jane Morrison-Ross, Chief Executive of SOSE - people who really understood that grouping together could deliver so much more than standing alone.

We’ve developed strategic partnerships across the public sector. Our Innovate for… initiative aims to bring groupings of organisations working in a common area to work with CivTech on collective themes, or missions. Which means the Challenges we launch have a far wider utilisation base, and therefore the potential to deliver far greater impact.

Innovate for Nature was the first through the gate and has brought together most of not all of the environmental and nature agencies in Scotland. With four mission-led Challenges on CivTech 8, more will follow on future Accelerators.

This will be followed by others. We’re working with the enterprise agencies and others on Innovate for the Economy, and Innovate for Wellbeing is also in the works.

These are not arbitrary targets: they lock into Scottish Government priorities.

It’s about coordinated activity and coordinated delivery.

Yes, all this requires flexibility and sometimes we’ve had to take our own ambitions and operational norms and slightly adjust them in flight. But strengths overplayed are weaknesses and closed minds are straitjackets, and we need to rise above these things.

The results speak for themselves. CivTech could not have done what it has done over the past few years without the help and support of the kinds of organisations I’ve mentioned here.

And if we keep pushing on the partnership agenda, we can continue to build a network of like-minded organisations who subscribe to the idea that through collaboration and genuine partnership working we can help create the best possible Scotland - even if that does mean occasionally putting aside your own obsessions for the greater good.

I remember it was Russell Dalgleish, Chairman, of Scottish Business Network who came up, in this context, with the idea of ‘the collision of the willing.’ It’s a very deliberate term that draws its inspiration from atomic fusion: fast moving particles collide and in doing so generate vast amounts of energy…

Fast moving initiatives willingly collide and in doing so generate vast amounts of positive energy and forward momentum…

The kind of things that really deliver, and can make the difference for Scotland.

Soon, there’ll be the chance for everyone in the GovTech space to build connections as a new initiative launches.

You’ll hear more on this very, very soon…

But it’s not just about GovTech. It applies across the board. So join us. Send a message…

‘Hello, I really do want to work alongside you.’

Close doors and we’ll die.

Open doors and we’ll thrive.

More information about the Scottish GovTech Cluster can be found here.