Thirty years ago, Lithuania announced a new vision: ‘Lithaunia 2000’. Pioneering the trends of co-creation, ‘Lithuania 2000’ invited the worlds largest tech companies to join forces with the aim to develop Lithuania’s public sector services and IT infrastructure.
Lithuania now has a strong digital foundation, but the pace of technological innovation and the needs of citizens are rapidly changing and constantly evolving. The public sector is in need of new, forward-thinking digital transformation. In Lithuania, the approach and core values have remained the same in achieving this – prioritising co-creation. Reflecting how times have changed over the past thirty years, a new group of co-creators and partners have emerged – startups and innovative companies.
GovTech transformation in Lithuania
Technology has been used by startups to disrupt major industries and sectors across the spectrum and tech innovation is undeniably booming. However, there’s one sector that startups often overlook but is in desperate need of disruption – government.
Over the past couple of years, Lithuania’s government has initiated new programmes to bring innovation developed by startups and entrepreneurs into the public sector. In 2019, GovTech Lab was set up in the Agency for Science, Innovation and Technology with an aim to help public sector institutions and innovative companies work together. GovTech Lab operates structured programmes that facilitate the co-creation of digital solutions for public sector challenges.
Arūnė Matelytė, Manager of the GovTech Lab, said: “Over the past few years, the GovTech Lab has helped solve about 60 challenges faced by our country’s institutions, with the help of startups and innovative companies. Lithuania is more than ready to embrace latest GovTech solutions and wants confirm its trend-setting role in the GovTech space by launching a new funded GovTech sandbox.”
This year, procuring innovative solutions from startups at scale became reality in Lithuania. GovTech sandbox enables startups and innovative companies to test out their pilot GovTech solutions with public sector entities via a design contest. Startups and innovative companies received monetary prizes and contracts of up to €53k to develop each pilot. Many of these exciting solutions are expected to be released by the end of the year – including a smart mental health assistant for the prevention of relapses, an artificial intelligence-based model for forecasting events that require the intervention of the police force, a tool for monitoring, analysing, and evaluating the activities of Vilnius educational institutions, to name just a few.
What began as an ambitious vision for Lithuania’s future 30 years ago is now a reality.
In January, all GovTech solutions that participated in the programme will be presented in a new GovTech report and will continue to digitally transform Lithuania – for the betterment of society as a whole.
Those who do not want to miss the release of the report, are warmly invited to subscribe to GovTech Lab Lithuania’s newsletter and stay up to date with the latest GovTech opportunities and innovations in Lithuania.
GovTech Lab Lithuania is a project at the Agency for Science, Innovation and Technology and has received funding from European Regional Development Fund. Number and name of operational programme measure: 01.2.1-LVPA-V-842 Inogeb LT.
