Democracy Innovators Podcast · democracyinnovators.com

Marcello Coppa on the Feel Community, the Govtech Forum and accelerating innovation

·49 min·3 clips

Coppa says public procurement is 'failing dramatically' and should be reformed.

Alessandro opens by asking Marcello Coppa what FIELD is and what the GovTech Forum does. Marcello answers directly. He says FIELD is an accelerator for innovation in the public system, created to speed up the adoption of innovation in public policies. It is a benefit company. Its first area of work is think tank activity, where it produces knowledge and acts as a platform and community for people working on innovation in the public system, and the GovTech Forum belongs to that line. Advisory comes next. FIELD advises companies, public administration institutions, and NGOs that want to push the envelope for innovation in the public system. Capacity building is the third area. In that work, FIELD gives civil servants, and also companies, the knowledge, competencies, and skills needed to understand what is coming next. Marcello then moves to another role. FIELD works with technology vendors and providers to help create the conditions for implementation by making them well known to public decision makers and understood in terms of the capabilities they can deliver. The organization acts as a bridge. He describes it as a matching platform and an open innovation platform between the public system and tech providers. Citizens come into the picture after that. FIELD runs campaigns to involve citizens in decision making and in the adoption of innovative public services. Marcello says that work is often overlooked. He argues that innovation projects fail when public administration focuses on technology and leaves citizen involvement before and after launch on the sidelines. Acceleration, in his view, means participatory design, behavior change, and adoption work that can include communication, behavioral science, and nudging. He also says this is often an agile way of working, which is unusual in public administration and in projects that happen in the public system. The closing turns outward toward collaboration, with Marcello calling for new alliances across GovTech, civic tech, advisory work, think tanks, and NGOs, and pointing to the GovTech Forum in March in Milan as a place to start.

As heard by us

FIELD frames public innovation around adoption, not just launch, with collaboration at the center.

Marcello Coppa presents FIELD as an accelerator for innovation in the public system, with the GovTech Forum as one of its main think tank activities and the rest of the organization built around advisory services and capacity building.

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Why you'd press play

You get FIELD's take on why public innovation needs more than a launch to actually stick.

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