On Wednesday 24 April, the Government of Catalonia took part in "GovTech4All Challenge Demo Day" held in Vilnius, Lithuania, and promoted by the GovTech4All consortium.

At the event, several European government agencies and organisations presented their challenges to an audience of start-ups. This format is known as a challenge competitionand its objective is to connect public administrations with start-up companies that can provide innovative solutions to the challenges they face in the field of government technologies (GovTech).

The Catalan Government's participation is being handled by the Secretariat of Telecommunications and Digital Transformation, which is in charge of the challenge and its funding, and infraestructures.cat, which presented the challenge and with whom the winning solution will develop the pilot project for testing.

For the time being, all the challenges from the different cities and regions have been submitted, but the competition associated with each challenge will be formally opened at a later date.

Using data to improve the energy efficiency of public buildings

The challenge presented today by infraestructures.cat proposes to optimise the energy consumption of the Catalan Government's buildings through the use of data, specifically based on the information available on consumption, billing, typology and uses of buildings and characteristics of air-conditioning and heating equipment.

The solutions presented by the companies in the challenge must be able to anticipate the useful life of the equipment, make recommendations based on data learning or analyse the budgets for energy-saving measures automatically, among others. The management of this data should also allow the maintenance of buildings to be assessed on the basis of the energy savings achieved.

After the presentation, the competition will be formally opened so the European start-ups can propose their solutions, and the winning proposal will develop the pilot with the Generalitat.

Catalonia among the innovative regions in Europe in governmental technologies (GovTech)

The GovTech4All consortium consists of 21 leading government agencies and private organisations in public innovation from 14 European countries. It is an initiative supported by the Digital Europe programme and promoted by the European Commission with the aim of establishing a cohesive GovTech ecosystem and market in Europe.

The Government of Catalonia has joined the consortium and is taking part in the GovTech Startup Challenge, one of the three projects currently promoted by GovTech4All. The initiative is doubly innovative, as, for the first time, it implements a common open innovation process with the participation of different European municipalities and regions and does so through project competitions, an innovative avenue for public procurement to impact on the transformation of the public sector.

In addition to the Government of Catalonia, agencies and organisations from Sweden (Bron Innovation), Lithuania (Innovation Agency Lithuania), Germany (GovMind), Portugal (Beta-I), Greece (GRNET) and Spain (Municipality of Madrid) are also part of the GovTech Startup Challenge.