[Applause] please welcome to the stage dr. Tanya fiber and Daniel korsky all right guff Tec government and technology government and innovation I thought about that when they invited me to do this it sounds like a contradiction to me it's how much innovation can there really be in government technology take that sure just to introduce myself briefly my name is Tonya filer and I work at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy which was set up just about a year and a half ago to rethink public policy in and for the 21st century so these kinds of questions are very much on our mind I think a good starting point is maybe to think about some of the kind of typical ideas about government and often as you say you know innovation doesn't come into that framework so maybe we should start with one of them which is accurate so it doesn't necessarily say government is innovative and it's accurate which is the government's in many countries in many parts of the world are aging they're old and I'm not just talking about the institutions but I'm talking about the people who work in them so just to take the example of the US quickly 45 percent of the federal workforce will be eligible for retirement in the next ten years seven percent of the federal workforce is under the age of 30 the government isn't rescaling itself for the 21st century at the pace that it needs to be so I think there's a grain of truth in your skepticism but I think over the course of the discussion of all also here some other sides of the story I hope so it's your job to convince me otherwise I am Rika Seberg I'm the director of the agency of detestation here in Denmark and when it comes to innovation and the public sector I say that the minister just told everybody that the 10 mag is one of the leading country when it comes to digitization of the public sector very early on we took some poor decisions about how to take it ties the public sector and that means today we deliver one of the most digitized public sector in the world it's efficient and it gives a good service to people we have to talk about innovation but indeed we have a good starting place and we have been very good so far Rolf care go see your best funding recently appointed very happy about that especially because when we talk about gov tech and talk about all the other tech areas within a Danish context there's so many opportunities out there to be seized upon and in the Gov tech space our perch really is an investor's approach we have a yeah you were saying it's probably the most digitized maybe that's a call spark statement I've seen numbers stating that we have the most digitized public sector in the entire world now that's a huge asset in our perspective from that definitely great ideas great new companies can emerge and they have emerged we need to focus all our attention on creating those pathways whereby this innovation that comes from the inside of government of government can get out and be commercialized and be the foundation for for new companies and we need to inject capital along the way and that's really what this whole collaborative effort is all about we're a vexed funding is just one piece of that puzzle like an afternoon everybody I'm Daniel Kooskia I'm the CEO and co-founder of public we are a venture firm focused on gov tekwar we run what is probably Europe's largest public sector focused accelerator program gov start/end and with that I again the business ministry we we help operate the Danish government's gov tech program and I guess I have to believe that you're wrong because if you're not wrong then I'm in deep trouble because our entire business has been built around this idea that while technology has perhaps been slow to transform public services compared to retail and financial services there is a real transformation underway there's an availability of new and exciting technologies developed and promoted by new companies but there's also a really interesting willingness Tania talks about that demographic gap but there are also lots of young people coming into the public sector and they're living these dual lives on the one hand they're living an incredibly digitized home life on their smartphone or during their holidays you know snap chatting with their friends and then they go in to a ministry and they're carrying around lots of paperwork from court to court that's not I don't think ok but but I think there's there's a pressure which is a very positive pressure um and and so I see I don't see these things as incompatible and I think it's unfair on public servants to say if you're a public servant you're you're not innovative and if you're an entrepreneur you are because that's not really the reality of it all but how do you bring those two and I like to think that old people can be innovative two different question how do you bring those two worlds together that world or maybe the government organization might not be might have lots of innovative people in it but that doesn't know how to use that kind of energy how do you make bring that together I mean I can speak for the entrepreneur side and Reagan maybe you feel better placed on the on the public sector side but firaon the entrepreneur side I think it's a lot about as in any business if you try to sell to a client you've got to understand the client you've got to understand their needs and you've got to show some empathy for what they are interested in and that is perhaps not doubly important when it comes to the public sector and harder to get close to understanding so from the entrepreneur side what we do when we work with early-stage companies is to try to get them to understand how to fit their product to market how to speak a language the public sector officials recognize how to understand the dynamics and incentives that are at work or you know with their with our customers and I think that at least brings those companies to a stage where they can engage in a dialogue I have to say the pictures that you're drawing of the public sector is being old filled with old people and we're carrying around paper world but that's not there maybe there's some people thinking that but that's not the Danish public sector actually as I started with to say we are one of the most digitized public sector in the world and actually we've been ticket size for many years so right now we are standing where we need new systems for a lot of the things we have you have an an eID who's everything every business in Denmark has one and now we stand at a point where we have to develop a new one we have to make a new ticket sell mailbox for everything's who also have that one of the only places in the world where it's it's the only place in the world where is mandatory to have a ticket settlement box and right now we are developing all these new systems and we're doing it together the old some of the big IT businesses in the market but what so I mean that we are doing that we working at China now we have a lot of young people who are thinking in new ways in public sector but what we should be discussing today is how we can enforce some of the start of some of the small companies to have a new growth history so they can grow up and being some of the big companies in the future and also about the students that we have some very brilliant students in in Denmark at the universities and I don't think we are capable enough to make use of all the knowledge that is there in the public sector have to work together so the picture where you're drawing with its we have an old public sector it's not there where we are but we need to focus on the startups and how we can make more innovation and get use of that in the public sector and that's exactly what the cupcake program is about well how do you do that how we do it yeah we got thing notes will help but what what is actually the program is about is that instead of in then mark or a lot of places in the public sector we do that when we have something a new system that we should have made we make a long pre-human big tenders where the public sector decides what kind of system do we need for this to solve this problem and then we give it to the market and the basic idea is that instead of the public sector is finding the solutions we say we have this problem we want to be solved have solved and then we give it to the market and said help us to get the best solution and you're working with Daniel what about the venture capital side of the business and are you working with venture capitalists absolutely we're we're part of that program as well and and when it comes to ways in which you can build that mode of interaction between the public sector and the private sector and especially the startup community I think this is really both a novel and a very rewarding approach that of putting out some some some real issues some real problems that the the damia sector is tackling with these days and and then allow for all the art entrepreneurship and development skills and the innovative capabilities of startups out there are two together go ahead and try to solve these issues and from that certainly will follow solutions for the issues at hand but the greater benefits will definitely be in many of those cases that these startups get their their additional customers um some great reference cases to go out there and tap to the world that they have buying customers and they're not just any other customer now this is a government sector that is the key customer to these startups and we all know how governments really need to have their act in order and so if you can qualify with those requirements that the government sector puts out there then the private sector should lay open essentially and and that's another thing we need to to recognize that it's not all about finding solutions that only work in the public sector for a lot of those applications out there for a lot of those companies that we're funding and that we're working with they they have solutions that might just as well be applied in the private sector and then you have a different type of dual use essentially and you can build out your customers customer based attacking both the the public sector as well as a private sector so there are there are some great opportunities out there we need to have an open mind about how gov tech can lead to global tech is actually I think it's worth remembering that it's not the case that government and technology firms have never worked together before there's a long history of those kinds of relationships but what gov tech is really about is resetting that relationship actually so moving beyond an idea that it's a typical client vendor relationship where the technology company is sort of left to get on with it after a procurement but actually to think about government having a more multifaceted role within the gov tech ecosystem and part of that certainly is about being knowledgeable procurers and ensuring that on the part of the state there's that knowledge to be able to procure effectively and responsibly but it's also about at other parts of the lifecycle of any given technology project so that they can be a real partners provide project oversight where necessary especially you know today we're moving towards the procurement of more advanced technologies as well in the government space including things like decision making technologies for issues like foster care or refugee location so these are these are clearly very weighty issues and it's incredibly important that policymakers have the tools to provide oversight when these kinds of technology projects are being delivered and I guess I would also add one further role which is around measurement and evaluation so I think that's also another government responsibility in this space to think about whether the projects are successful and what success looks like what does success look like for you and I want to talk about procurement quite a bit as well but when you think about bringing on start out technologies into the government with what the success look like for you it's it's a difficult question because we have right now we have this huge tender processes that we have huge projects and one of the issues in all over the world in the government is two attitudes IT projects when they fail you can't fail because you serve the citizens and have to make services to citizens so what we've done here is in this program we have to start as some pilots will get some experience is how is this going to work how can we work with the tender rules which is the EU legislation how can we work with that to make new innovative ways of working together you can't start by making a whole new big system for neeght in in this way but we have to find these problems around the public sector we can put out and have some experiences how we do this and then I definitely believe that's the way we have to do it III think it's worth just taking a step back and say whoa why are we talking about this why are we I mean yes it's cool and sexy to talk about startups but why do we think that startups and public services you know could work well together and I think I think the reason why is we know startups operating in a very different way than other small businesses that have been around for a long time they usually venture-backed in order to achieve that to overcome existing problems that nobody has quite found their way around and they're they're culturally and financially strapped in order to do so at a very fast rate let's really want to start our visits what a start-up does and retail financier and so you know there is Norvel you that that cultural and financial construct can provide to a public sector that is dealing with aging populations and lots of you know different kinds of demands so that's that's kind of why we're talking about it but I but I do think it's it's fair before we sort of get into the mechanics of procurement to talk a little bit about the journey everybody needs to go on the gov tech program does not in any way assume that if it succeeds it will transform all Danish public services but as Nagus says it is the beginning of showing how a different approach not saying down to the last specification what the government wants but allowing that kind of energy that exists in the startup that cannot be brought to bear and help define new ways of solving a problem so that's the sort of part of the journey another part of the journey is also allowing public servants to be if you were given the space to think and operate differently with the market player to Tonya's point not for them to be totally constrained by large existing processes so that's partly what what a program like the gov tech program tries to do and I think another point that that we need to throw out there is that the moment we start fostering engagement and involvement between the government and startups errors will be made mistakes will occur because that's just the nature of startups they're not all going to survive so we need to appreciate the fact that when we do engage with a start-up on a gunner on a critical problem that needs an equally critical solution then in in most cases it will work but in some case it won't and when it doesn't work then it's okay because that's just part of this innovative creative process that you get from working with someone who's not one of the large global consultancies were all hooked up in their long legacy and and and and traditional ways of doing things which is all great in many cases but in in these other cases or we're wanting to tap into the the richness that lies within this startup community then we need to make ourselves comfortable with the fact that but we'll get so many more benefits from tapping into those resources and that's why we should do it and I agree so much and that's exactly why we need a new approach to how we do it in to business in the public sector when it comes to the IT because all these huge procurements and tenders we're making where we're making a long list of what the systems should could could do in the end there's no room for failure in those way of doing the tenders so we need to find new ways on how to work together to make trial and error but also that we can make it the smaller scale actually when we have to iterate maybe because we've talked about sort of success over here and failure over here but the reality is that most startups in those sectors succeed by iterating iterating fast you know try this does it work what did we learn okay ship another development try that ship and that it isn't just that we struggle all of us with accepting failure in the public sector but also we struggle with iteration you know we want when we buy something we want the finished product to be delivered but for certain things even if we've got to create you know kind of a reservation of experimentation we need to create some kind of way in which we also allow to iterate because then you get the best out of these these companies and that's what it's also give us a speed and that's also a problem for the public sector today because when we start a new project it gets four or five years later we get the solution and and with the fast development we need to get the speed and that's also a huge problem for the public sector and this way if we can find new ways we can have the products faster fail faster find the solutions faster it was also be a huge benefit for public sector I think there are also two dimensions to this question of what success looks like from the perspective of government gov't programs so what I've noticed in a few different countries is that there are two primary objectives although it's not always articulated like this so one of them is very much about bringing innovation into the domestic public sector and changing how it works and the other is about industry creation so creating an industry of startups that can also sell into other countries and contribute to economic growth those objectives are not mutually exclusive in fact I think they feed into each other very well but they're not the same and therefore understanding what success looks like is rather contingent on which one of those or what combination of those that you're going for and then going back to the point about measurement measuring effectively and evaluating effectively along the way and along the way is it important to remember precisely to this point about iteration in order to be able to introduce policy tweaks along the way if you find that the objective isn't quite being met now from the startups perspective it's pretty clear what success looks like because it means selling to the government and maybe to enterprises and others as well and doing that a lot because one other definition of a start-up is a company that's scaling very rapidly is that even an option for a gov tech startup to scale that quickly that a VC here or in Silicon Valley would really be all that interested in a gov tech company why don't you ask trade shift that question you would consider them a chief healthcare company that's how it originated and and now we're talking about one of the growing number of unicorns to come out of the dead market so yeah you should not limit yourself at the outset to only talking about selling to the government sector you should always be open to opportunities for branching into through the private sector and there for most startups I'll tell you there will be opportunities in both sectors yeah and then you have multiple governments around the world and you have sub levels of government and and that means you can definitely scale Haigh originated startup just like any other tech originated so there's some good history right Oracle the large American company do way the word Oracle comes from it was the project that Larry Ellison convinced the CIA to work with him on that was it was called project Oracle and from project Oracle an initial seed investment by the CIA came Oracle the company Palantir the sort of you know contemporary equivalent is also a gov tech company now valued at god knows about thirty billion dollars or so and in Europe we've been slower but there are great examples and we are seeing larger and larger rounds and more and more companies winning the scale sometimes in Europe sometimes in the US and North America sometimes elsewhere so this is definitely something that's coming I just would like to challenge an assumption that all startup growth is the same or all the same curve there's a huge difference from B to C to enterprise sales and if you have tried to sell to HP or General Electric or in this context maybe mask or or any other larger going for Danfoss you I'm sure will bear the scars on your back that is not an easy sales process and the journey is not as hockey-stick steep as the b2c equivalent is but on the other hand you know there is longevity in those kind of enterprise sales same with you know government sales there's enormous credibility that comes from anchor customers like that so I think we also have to sort of compare light for light and I also think there's another dimension and it was something that sort of I thought of telling when you were speaking which is and I hope this isn't to coerce to say but it is enormously sensitive what kind of technology we deploy in our public sector not least because there it touches on everybody's lives and in touches on people who may not be able to make judgments for variety of reasons whether they want to be touched by it or not and so it's hugely important that we are comfortable not just with the oversight that Tonya talks about but with the ethical framework that companies are operating in and if you zoom I can't help but ask myself this question would I like the technology that powers the Danish state to be built in China would I like it to be build America would I like there to be a thriving Nordic gov tech scene anchored in a country like Denmark that isn't only producing great products and great companies but also built on great values values that I am a slightly more comfortable with how other people will feel differently we're all different some people say it doesn't matter price is most important but to me you know that ethical dimension is not unimportant and and you can only really ensure that by inculcating a domestic system or a Nordic or European system that ascribes to those kind of values I do think it's important to think about these two questions of what success looks like for governments and success looks like for startups and investors together because a lot of governments are interested in gov tech because they want to increase competition for public sector contracts and therefore hopefully drive up quality and in some instances also drive out corruption in the process now in the short term I absolutely see how that works but thinking a little bit longer term a number of the larger acquisitions that we've seen in this space are from the corporate venture arms of large technology companies that already sell into government and some of it so we've seen both investments presumably with an eye to acquisition and acquisition itself now that to me doesn't say in the long run that gov tech by default as a sector leads to greater competition for public sector contracts what it does say is that we need to think carefully about the way and the qualities of investment that is offered to startups in this space and not just at the very early precede seed stage but later on to encourage competition you know you need access to capital that means that you don't immediately have to go for acquisition and of course you also need access to skills as a talented workforce so I think it's important to think about that of longer term ecosystem shaping as well I would like to say we have to remember also why are we digitized in the public sector and and we do it for for at least two reasons and the one is that we create a better service for the citizens when the citizens and the business is today their identity eyes world they also expect the public sector to deliver the service at a certain level and the digitization can give them that that's one point the other point is that it also gave makes an efficient public sector with it excite-ation we make it more efficient and then we can spend more money on the direct welfare and we serve a priority for the government so that's two very important objectives so that's why the ticket size the public sector and then also we have the competition then there's some following of that as you said the competition was who wants that and also we need to to empower the the universities in 10 mentor students and we have a a common goal here to to make use of all the knowledge that our the universities and I have to admit I don't think we have been good at that in Denmark in the public sector to get that use and also that's why we want to enter these programs also to to give the empowerment for the big growth of the startup so for the students and and creates something more value-added of all the money we use in the public sector and put into the IT markets if I can just speak to the point about universities you know if we think historically if we think about any innovation ecosystem I would struggle to think of one where universities haven't played a key role at almost every point of the innovation lifecycle so right from the beginning the research and development I mentioned but also through to later commercialization stages and we're not seeing much of it in gov tech we're really not and I think it's incredibly important you know there's of course the formal educational diamond dimension at universities but I think it's really important to be creating as many spaces and opportunities for students from different disciplines across the technology social sciences border to be in one room talking about these top together because they are the future investors future policymakers future founders and it's incredibly important that they're speaking the same language right from before they start their careers so that we don't replicate this system of silos and fragmentation between the sector's no there can I just quickly pick up on that I so agree and I find it so interesting that you can good at universities and still see if you go to a a political science faculty technologies kind of still sort of weirdly bolted on to the core of the curriculum and similarly if you go to a more technical minded University then you know the politics is kind of a sort of add-on for those weird people who are interested in that interface and I think it is getting better and it's not just I mean my comment isn't so much about Denmark as much about University of seen everywhere and I'm really struck that there isn't anywhere globally maybe the Bennett Institute in Cambridge will become that you know that has set itself up to say no we are going to have the national school of government and technology and it may be brought together by different universities that each bring something else but this is the place we are trying to educate the future you know digital official because if you think back historically you know who created the world around us you know people who came out of you know particular educational establishments after the Second World War who had shared a certain wartime experience who would it open educated within a very similar Canon of thought that Canon is now being transformed by technology and we now kind of need to develop a new Canon and a new place for people to go from the venture capital side and that's kind of picking up on what you were talking about in the universities do you find that the Guf tech entrepreneur is different from the consumer startup entrepreneur that you encounter they're a different profile of founders I wouldn't say they I've been struck by different profiles really but the the approach to selling is different and that's getting back to your point the sales cycles and dynamics being a profoundly different from enterprise sales to sale selling to the government and and perhaps more startups out there or just driven by that desire to build of their own company should recognize that fact because um government agencies don't see themselves as competitors so if you have sold to a government agency a revolutionary breakthrough solution and they're going to tell that to all the other agencies and they're gonna and that those recommendations are going to travel cross-border and and proliferate from from there so you can tap in to what some extent our network effects from some from selling B to GE as opposed to B to C where or B to B where if you're selling to to one company and one industry then they're not as likely to go in and until their competitors that they have this competitive edge because now they have these great solution running their operations so that that really is a very interesting market or sales dynamic and that can can feel startup settling and startup grow so I kind of feel like answering the question by talking about about the the philanthropic focus in the valley by a lot of founders which is recently has well we've seen in the values a lot of funding by a lot of the founders into cancer research and well why is that well it's probably not unrelated to the fact that a lot of the people who've done really well over the last 20 years in the valley who are now running companies or exited companies are now hitting a demographic moment where this is suddenly becoming really personal what a cynical you know who'd like all families you know I have had my my family affected by cancer but it's simply to say and there is something going on that has to be explained somewhere and but why do I want to talk about that because what I see is increasingly people coming out of the tech sector having you know built a great app that gets a pizza to you faster than anybody else having built a great you know site with been a UX and you know to to download your famous to your favorites to TV series and they're they're increasingly interested in doing something bigger doing something with impact doing something that has a lasting effect doing something for society and so I when we look at founders we see a lot of people coming out of different sectors they weren't cuff tech before but they may have made some money they may have learned some things and they kind of feel like the next startup I do has to do something bigger so we see that and the second thing we see we increasingly see people coming out of the public sector thinking I too can build a company now some of them can some of them can't but but we kind of increasing you see that led primarily by the medical profession where most sort of doctors surgeons they're like there's this thing that I just could really use here and I know it because I've stood in the operating theatre for 10 years and I just want that thing but we also increasingly see it in police and military people who've been very close to the problem and have developed a solution and now kind of think that the cost of construction by which I mean the cost of capital the ease of access to technology is so low that it's not impossible for them to get into the game - let's talk strategy for a moment we talked about procurement let's maybe get down to the nitty gritty the the boring part from the government but what what are you seeing are the biggest mistakes that these startups make when they try to sell to governments in the public sector that's that's a hot question from from my chair and I think that maybe it's maybe something about how the sector's each other how the startups look at the public sector I often hear that the lot of the startups you know they give up before they even got started because it's so difficult to do business with the public sector and I think then some of the big tenders of course as there's problems but but also I think that there's a lot of throughout the country there's actually a lot of the startups that is doing business with some of them maybe not in the States and in the agencies but at the municipality level or at a certain hospitals maybe it's more decentralized where it's smaller but I think that one of the important things is that we have to we need to change the culture we need to change the culture in the public sector and we need to change the culture also by the startups so we can start talking together and that's one of also the programs those that you know we should learn each other's language and and get some definitions of how we can do business together so I think it's not we also always talk about the tinder rules as is totally difficult and totally impossible so for small companies to do business with public sector and actually there will be some ways we can do it but we just need to talk about how to do it and to get more clearance about it there's there's an article in The Economist this week with the headline I'm from a business I'm here to help and that article is really about businesses that are very emphasizing purpose mission driven approaches but not necessarily that they're trying to work with governments and I see this globally I've recently completed a large piece of work for a Regional Development Bank in Latin America and they're the consistent message from the startup side is that they are developing products that have a public purpose but they are not even attempting to sell them into government so you essentially have this parallel system in place I think what all of us are saying and you know many other people in the Gulf tech ecosystem its government really matters and actually one way to scale your efforts is to sell in to them and of course that has to be facilitated but I think there's also that obstacle on the startup side the very idea of selling into government is incredibly foreign to them and even if they do have a very public driven approach they don't see partnering with government as the way to do that so like the shadow IT their shadow detector just bypasses the government yeah and especially you know for example with the sustainable development goals which is on everybody's mind at the moment how do you scale approaches to meeting some of those objectives it has to be in partnership across the sector's and gov tech is you know at the core of that I just I totally hear what you're saying yeah I think we just we mustn't I submit think that anything that happens outside of the government is by definition bad without supervision and threats because I think what technology is also allowing us to do is to solve some of these big problems without having to go through the government burdening the taxpayer the question then is how do you provide oversight over some of these things I totally accept that but what I find so fascinating is is technology and is allowing things to emerge that the government hasn't thought about or hasn't thought about solving it will probably not be able to prioritize solving but if it creates a good and if it can create another revenue stream to sustain that good you know all the better for it and so I think it's important that when we talk about gov tech we kind of appreciate the breadth of the concept yes it's about you know the email INBOX that they get talked about but it's also potentially about trade shifts that all have talked about and it's about you know lots of other companies that we see I think this is a really interesting question which is how do you maintain some kind of quality insurance how do we ensure that there's equitable distribution of services in a society and those are fascinating questions that I certainly don't have the answer to but I do see a lot of entrepreneurs who are saying hey I can solve this thing and I do see a lot of comments saying we love that but it's not we don't really have a tender we're really not going to go to tender but we still want that stuff to happen it's tearaway out for the government to then actually help cuz we talked about that a bit how can you then work with these startups if there is no tender process if you just find something interesting you want to start working with but that's exactly what the program why we're starting with the business the Ministry of business and we're starting this program to find new ways to work together with the startups and and as I said before you know we have to try to find the new ways of of doing businesses so I think we have the second round of the program is as in the pipeline and I think that's it's going to be good but it but it's it's huge culture change there also has to be in public sector and it's not doing over the night so it comes it will take some some time before we get there and and we have to drive these pilot projects and then also find solutions to some of the problems that follow come along the way but the important thing is that both the startup community and the public sector is in the program together but if my if I maybe expand upon that that goes back to that notion about the ecosystem that the whole idea of thinking about is in in an ecosystem perspective really does drive a lot of of that cultural change a lot of that interaction a lot of that invest for attention a lot of that government spending really it will get that positive spiral going if if we all agree that there are art opportunities to be had from making the different science get together you talked about the university sector well that's a critical component within a thriving ecosystem so we need to crack that code of why isn't there if there isn't sufficient university research within the gov tech space and and if it's there and whatever is there how do we make sure that that is easily translated into commercial purposes and and foundations for for startups and and and commercial success and then we'll get some positive feedback going really so one of the an added benefit from from all of this and these programs is that it gets everyone talking about gov tech as a possible cluster a possible ecosystem within the broader ecosystem just like the minister before we got on stage talked about how the robotics cluster emerged within a within Denmark not overnight it took 30 years but there were some components out there some some dots on the map that when properly connected great things emerged and we firmly believe that we we can do we can do something within the gov tech space in Denmark we have all of the critical components in place we just need to go ahead and then we also should remember that every ministry and then mark every agency is working with digitization they were working with digitize there they're all there are administrative systems and all the services to the citizens and the gov tech program is it's one of the many many initiatives we have on the ticket cessation agenda in Denmark so it's just it's a new way of looking and how we do businesses will start up from public sector but there's a whole area of very innovative projects that are coming along from the former government and everybody is struggling with how to work more agile how to break down the huge projects we have had to smaller projects and all that also goes in direction of involving the the smaller businesses so it's not the Coptics program as we discussed today it doesn't stand alone we have a whole bunch of other units as well as far as government-sponsored Guf tech programs go how much evidence is there that they actually work well they're very young you know some of the pioneering programs have you know been discussed today so the simple answer is it's hard to say most uh you know under two three years old there's not much data available on the long-run success I think what we can say is we know that accelerators can produce good results you know that there are evidence bases for broader technology sector programs of this nature but the simple answer is it's too early to say and as I say I think it's important to measure early and often in order to provide tweaks with these kinds of programs as they develop over the next few years I guess I would just take it back and say the programs like the cough tech program in Denmark or the latest duration iteration of governments seeking to support you know digital transformation of a sector you know DARPA in the u.s. have done so for years in the military the israeli defense establishment have done so for many years and but so have many others and this is in a way the latest iteration taking onboard learnings from other sectors in order to see if that can like provide the catalytic change that we want to see and I think M to Ralph's point if it's creating a different kind of conversation then the one that we had before then that in and of itself I think could be potentially transformative far beyond what you know the individual program is but simply to say some of the programs that we have both observed or backed companies that have come out of Iran you know we see companies that that enter programs like that and leave as much more mature mature companies having understood their customer in a fundamentally different way and just in their product or qualified themselves out of the gov tech sector which which can be just as important don't spend your time on that if actually what you need to be chasing is is shipping so we see a lot of you know value for the store I would like to think that there's a lot of value for the public sector side not for me too for me to answer but I I certainly see a lot of transformative impact I would also just like to link this to the question about universities and students there is student interest you know in jobs with public purpose the student interest in working in the public sector certainly just looking at the UK I was looking at data from our first stream program which brings elite graduates into the public sector and in 2017 there were 12,000 applicants for 80 places on the diplomatic stream in the same year there were under 2,000 for the same number of jobs in data and technology which says to me that apart from anything else there's an image problem specifically around data too and technology in government the diplomatic stream is still seen as really attractive exciting adventure you have to wait 20 years in a connection technology is not seen in that way so we need to think about how do you remake that image and obviously there's a compensations I mention as well which is that if you are you know leaving University as an engineer there are plentiful jobs that are going to pay you a lot more than a typical public sector role we need to address that I mentioned but I think the image part is key as well and one thing I would say is that accelerator programs and things like that that are run by governments I think can help with that you know as part of a broader thinking of broader rethinking of how we bring people in all right I hope we've done some of that today our time is up before they kick us off this stage I know we could still talk around the hour not exhaust all the topics in golf tech but thank you very much thank you [Applause]