We firmly believe startups will play a key role in the post Covid-19 recovery and speeding up governments digitalization. Therefore, we will hold a startup showcase during the National Innovation Week held by ENAP, the main government school in Brazil. The provocation will be: do you want to know more about how startups can collaborate with the government in facing the future after COVID-19 crisis? The pandemic has had significant implications not only in ​​health, but also in many countries’ socioeconomic scenarios. BrazilLAB, the first govtech hub in Brazil, believes that the partnership between government and highly scalable companies has great power to support public managers to leave behind inefficient processes, to understand what is essential in the public power and, mainly, to bring innovations to do things differently.

To provide that, BrazilLAB will host a startups showcase with solutions in several areas, but with a special focus on topics such as education, health and digitalization of public services. The objective of the activity is to enable the most prominent startups and SMEs that participated in the last acceleration cycles of BrazilLAB, mainly in the Covid-19 Task Force, to pitch their solutions, in order to increase their impact in different municipalities or even levels of government in the world.

Event reflections

Summary of the event

The event aimed to expose innovative and technological solutions to public managers. The solutions are intended, in general, to combat the negative effects caused and intensified by the pandemic. For this reason, we brought five startups to present their solutions and clarify possible doubts from public
managers. The greatest motivation is to show that the Government can be innovative, disruptive, and that the entrepreneurial ecosystem can be a great ally in this journey.

What was the most powerful idea, insight or realisation that came out of the event?

All the solutions presented are very interesting and can be very efficient for society and the public sector. We started the presentations with the startup 3Wings, which has a solution to hospital management focusing on the systemic management of tasks, people, and teams in real-time. We continue with the Arvore Educaçã to democratize and disseminate access to reading in a dynamic, updated, sustainable, and economical way, throughout the country through technology. AUA Conecta is a platform for promoting small businesses and brought the case of the metropolitan region of Belém. Bright Cities is a platform for diagnosing cities for public management, providing optimization of public management, resulting in better quality and lower cost of execution of public services and accelerating the use of smart solutions. Fonte de Preços proposes a system that specializes in price quotations for public tenders. And we end with the UNIVERSAUDE solution that aims to improve the quality of health services in Brazil by developing support and education actions for managers and professionals.

What do we collectively need to keep talking about?

We all must continue to promote public sector innovation. The incorporation of technologies by
governments should be encouraged and the entrepreneurial sector can be a great ally in this journey.

Reflecting back on the event, what key insights or conclusions can be shared about what should be “left behind” beyond the crisis? (ex. What has proven to no longer fit in the current context?)

One of the main points that must be left behind after the crisis is the technological backwardness of
governments.

Reflecting back on the event, what key insights or conclusions can be shared about what should be “kept” beyond the crisis? (ex. What has proven to be important, what were things introduced in crisis response that should be kept after?)

We understand that the Brazilian entrepreneurial ecosystem is extremely dynamic, creative, and resilient. We see that these are valuable qualities that must be maintained.

Reflecting back on the event, what key insights or conclusions can be shared about what collectively we should “do differently” beyond the crisis?

From the exhibitions presented – 3Wings, Arvore Educação, Bright Cities, Fonte de Preços, and Universaude – we observed extremely efficient and creative solutions that can greatly help the public sector to face the challenges caused by the pandemic. These six solutions are a great example that the entrepreneurial sector has the capacity to effectively help governments.