Govtechlab Madrid already has its first participating municipalities

Govtechlab Madrid, the laboratory that brings innovative solutions from startups, scaleups and digital SMEs to the major challenges facing public administrations in our region, already has the first five municipalities that will participate in this second edition. They are Alcobendas, Carabaña, Fuenlabrada, Torrelodones and Collado Mediano.
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Each of these municipalities will have the opportunity to learn about, experiment and implement digital solutions in real environments to facilitate services and demands that affect citizens in their daily lives. In addition, the digital solutions proposed will enable long-term decisions to be made taking into account sustainability criteria.

In this first phase, the teams of the participating city councils will develop dynamics to identify and prioritise specific problems that can be solved with digital solutions. In May, these challenges will be communicated to the community of startups, scaleups, digital SMEs, investors and launchers, and innovative projects will be identified and presented to the municipalities. Later, the projects with the greatest potential will be chosen and one of them will be piloted. At the end, the results will be analysed and disseminated for use by other public administrations and the Madrid and global govtech ecosystem. This whole process of challenge identification, public-private dialogue, piloting and dissemination of results is called open innovation.

As a fundamental part of the programme, civil servants will be trained in govtech methodologies so that they can continue to replicate this type of process in the future and startups will be trained in strategy to compete in the public sector.
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The aim of this new call is not only to continue strengthening Madrid’s govtech ecosystem, but also to take advantage of these innovative technological solutions from the administration to generate a positive impact on citizens.