CivTech Round 10 launches offering up to £8 million to entrepreneurs & start-ups to help solve public sector challenges

Applications to submit ideas to tackle nine different challenges are now open. They range from cutting pharmaceutical waste to using technology to improve public engagement in policymaking. Additional “wildcard” challenges are anticipated to launch in the coming weeks.  Successful applicants will work with their Challenge Sponsor to develop their proposal and pitch for a place in the programme’s Accelerator phase, which offers both financial and practical support to develop the business and market the concept to the public sector.

Since it launched in 2016, around £20 million of Scottish Government funding has been invested in the CivTech programme, with 90 companies and entrepreneurs helped to grow and develop.  These include bioscience company SilviBio and Tape for Trees, which developed new seed germination technologies to help Forestry and Land Scotland increase the efficiency and survival rates of its tree seedlings.

Employment and Investment Minister Tom Arthur said:

“Driving entrepreneurship and innovation is important to helping unlock each of the Scottish Government’s priorities of eradicating child poverty, boosting economic growth, achieving net zero and improving public services.  In CivTech, we have a way to stimulate progress across each of these priorities so that, together, we can improve people’s lives and achieve our ambitions as a nation.

 

This funding offers a unique opportunity not just to foster and support the innovators and entrepreneurs as part of a vibrant economy, but harness their ideas and inventions to continually test and improve our public services and our way of life.”

CivTech 5 participant Angela Prentner-Smith, Founder and CEO of This is Milk said:

“CivTech was a launchpad for us. We got the amazing opportunity to develop a world-first platform directly with Government stakeholders, who trusted us to develop the product in line with user needs.  My CivTech journey started with my 3-person band business, my five-year-old and a two-week-old baby called Neve. I showed up to the accelerator, baby in hand, through Covid lockdown and the team couldn’t have been more supportive.

 

The result has been Neve Learning, the most accessible and inclusive, hybrid learning platform on the market. We’ve worked with the public sector for many years, and never found a fit for purpose procurement opportunity that genuinely provides the platform for innovation and human-centred product design.”

The CivTech Round 10 challenges are as follows :

Challenge 10.1

How can technology be used to improve situational awareness for emergency responders, before, during and after a wide range of incidents — looking first at the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service?

Challenge 10.2

How can technology identify and measure firefighter exposure to contaminants across a wide range of incidents?

Challenge 10.3

How can technology help improve the monitoring and protection of seabirds in various environments, focussing initially on the challenge of monitoring puffins above and below ground?

Challenge 10.4

How can technology make the sharing of data across organisations with separate legal obligations as seamless and easy to manage as possible, and so encourage activity that could maximise public good outcomes, including but not limited to the use of AI and automated data analysis?

Challenge 10.5

How might we use technology to better understand the supply and demand of digital economy skills at the regional level — both today and in the future?

Challenge 10.6

How can we use technology to administer, measure and predict the performance in regard to carbon of Woodland Carbon Code and Peatland Code projects more coherently, efficiently and effectively?

Challenge 10.7

How can technology help us deliver high-quality, scalable, public participation in decision-making, inspiring trust around ethical data use and sharing, AI, and wider public good activities?

Challenge 10.8

How can technology reduce pharmaceutical waste?

Challenge 10.9

How can technology increase circularity in the NHS Scotland supply chain?

AI for Impact Wildcard Challenge 10.10

How can technology help make teachers’ workload be more manageable, enabling them to focus on the activities that add the most value to learners’ outcomes?

You can find out more about the CivTech process by clicking HERE.