Luxembourg taps into innovation for better government tech

The GovTech Lab provides access to leading edge technology 

“The Ministry for Digitalisation and the CTIE work together to improve services through govtech – and the GovTech Lab is an important part of our work,” says Christine Zoller, member of the Ministry for Digitalisation in charge of the lab. “We can rely on an IT sector that is very well developed and a government that has a lot of experience running IT projects.” 

“We created the GovTech Lab to build and enhance more govtech solutions for the three key players: public administrations, citizens and businesses,” says Luis Carvalho Da Silva, member of the CTIE in charge of the GovTech Lab. “The solutions we promote now are to meet national needs, but they are designed to be interoperable at the European level.” 

The lab has three missions. The first is to accelerate innovation in the public sector by contributing to the transformation of public services – it does this by identifying challenges and launching calls for solutions. The challenges are concerns that public entities might have and that might be solved by innovative solutions, including digital technology. Once one or more challenges are identified, a call for solutions is launched. 

There are two processes for doing this. For projects where innovative solutions are needed, an innovation partnership is used, which involves a new public procurement process that allows for more flexibility in the whole process of selection. The lab tries to collaborate with external actors, which could be startups, researchers, freelancers, businesses or students.

This is an iterative process to work out the details of the solution through different phases: the proof of concept phase and the pilot project phase. At the end of these phases, a candidate is selected by a jury composed of two fixed members (Vera Soares and Patrick Houtsch) and variable members – civil servants or external experts. 

For smaller projects where a fast interaction with external experts is needed, the GovTech Lab launches a SpeedUP. This is mainly used for small pilot projects or expert analysis or reviews. 

The second mission of the GovTech Lab is to create a govtech community through dedicated events. This endeavour is supported by the physical space of the lab located in the CTIE building, where many events have already taken place since its opening in March 2022. 

It also networks with external actors, doing things such as hackathons, designathons, co-creative sessions and thematic conferences, where it invites different actors from the ecosystem to come to the GovTech Labs to discuss new trends, share experiences or simply co-create on a specific topic. Everybody can share ideas to find better ways of helping with the digital transformation of the state. 

The third mission is to become the reference place for state officials to go to when they’re interested in digital technologies and to use a more co-creative and agile approach when it comes to designing new applications for the public sector.

“We really try to foster the exchange…with the different administrations and ministries so they can more easily share their input and expertise ,” says Zoller. 

So far, the GovTech Lab has launched three innovation projects: Bye Bye Robots, Trust My Data and Virtual Meeting Room.

Bye Bye Robots is a new captcha solution to secure forms on the internet, so they aren’t overloaded by robot requests.

Trust My Data is a platform that issues official digital certificates that can be stored in the form of either credentials or digital certificates in an e-wallet and that can be verified by anyone.

Virtual Meeting Room intends to offer the possibility to citizens to meet the public agent in charge of their inquiry via an online video-conferencing tool which will be integrated in the one-stop portal called MyGuichet.lu.