The session explores the notion of innovation diplomacy. Not yet a widely known concept, innovation diplomacy uses new ideas and technology to build relations between governments with a focus on delivering shared policy outcomes and better public services. Innovation diplomacy is the idea at the heart of the CivTech Alliance’s COP26 Global Scale-Up Programme, a highly ambitious programme that brought together 8 government innovation teams (including the US, Estonia, Australia and Scotland), and 3 academic institutions from 10 countries to give 18 climate tech companies an unprecedented international market access and opportunity in the run up to and during COP26.
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Innovation Diplomacy: Cross-Border Collaboration to Save the Climate
Alexander Holt is head of International Ecosystems in the Entrepreneurship Division of the Scottish Government. He established and co-chairs the GovTech Global Alliance – a network of public purpose innovation teams around the world. Leading up to this, Alexander established Europe’s first govtech programme: Scottish Government’s CivTechⓇ Programme in 2015. In 2017 he won the Leadership Award at the Scottish Public Service Awards. In 2020 he was named as one of the Top 20 global leaders in GovTech and in 2021 won Apolitical’s Global Public Service Team of the Year 2021 (Climate category), and World Economic Forum’s Top 50 Leaders navigating disruption.
He is a massive champion of the mindset of public entrepreneurship and creative bureaucracy – the persistence to move forward, the resilience to take the flak and the urgency to get results. As a previous speaker at the Creative Bureaucracy Festival, he is delighted to be one of the judges of this necessary and growing movement.
Eva Sonnenmoser is an associate at the Innovation Lab of the state government of Baden-Württemberg in southwest Germany. The “InnoLab_bw” supports the state ministries in helping innovations in important future topics to achieve a breakthrough quickly and effectively. One emphasis is on innovation within the public sector. Thereby, the InnoLab deals with the question of how the state can make administration more innovative with the help of GovTechs, but also new digital tools and new working methods.
The InnoLab is part of the CivTech Alliance and was a partner of last year’s CivTech Alliance COP26 Global Scale-Up Programme.