Welcome to another episode of the Democracy Innovator Podcast and our guest of today is Marcello Coppa.
So thank you for your time and for being here.
Thank you, Alessandro.
Thank you for hosting me.
It's a pleasure.
as a first question I'd like to ask you what is Phil and also what is the GovTech forum you're working on.
tour.
uh I'm very happy to uh answer.
Phil is an accelerator for innovation in the public system.
So basically we try to speed up the adoption of innovation in the context of public policies.
That's our goal.
That's our mission.
Phil is a benefit company that has three main areas of activity.
The first one is think tank.
So we produce knowledge and we act as
uh platform, as a community to gather people that uh deal with innovation in the public system and the GovTech Forum is one of the main activities in this line of business or
field and I'm going to tell you more about the GovTech Forum in a while.
The second area is that of advisory so we do advisory services both for companies and for public administration institutions.
uh
NGOs that want to push the envelope for innovation in the public system.
And the third one is capacity building.
So we uh keep the civil servants in particular, but also companies with the knowledge, with the competencies, with the skills that are needed to understand what's going on in
terms of innovation and to adopt innovation wisely and effectively in the context of power.
system.
I keep on saying the public system because that's the definition that we provide of uh
has to do with public interest, which is not only dealing with, strictly speaking, public administration and governments, but in general with uh all the policies and all the
decisions that typically are made by public decision makers, whether elected or not in the different government and state bodies.
uh But it has also a lot to do with companies, with corporations, whether
they are in regulated markets or in deregulated markets uh that anyhow deal with services of public interest and if we think about different sectors such as health or energy or
telco uh or mobility
We may find in different geographies, in different spaces, in different time, uh companies and operators that have been public, have been privatized or have been heavily regulated,
anyhow.
we talk about the public system in order to avoid all of this confusion and to focus on what really matters, which is the policies that impact on citizens' lives, on people's
lives.
So this is the definition that we give and Phil deals with innovation in this context.
The GovTech Forum is the main activity that we uh organize in our think tank together with other studies and research that we publish.
And it's a gathering or better, it's a platform.
And the most important part of this platform is the gathering.
It's the forum itself, which is a two-day uh event, which takes place uh every spring in Milan until now.
It has taken place in Milan and the upcoming edition is going to be on the 19th and the 20th of March, so in a while.
And it gathers the civil servants and the elected officials and managers of uh companies and government-owned companies and different...
uh
type of innovators that work within and around the public system to do innovation in this context.
uh We uh focus on uh technological innovation, GovTech.
GovTech is a concept that has been defined by the World Bank.
are partner of
is called uh Public Sector Innovation in GovTech program.
And therefore, we adopt the definition of GovTech given by the World Bank, which is basically a whole of government approach to the public administration reform and to the
improvement of the impact, not only of the efficiency of uh public.
administration in the different areas of public policy and this is a very important aspect that I will underline in a while, with the citizens at the center, with the citizens at
the heart of reform.
So in order to make government uh activity
better in terms of efficiency, but in particular in terms of effectiveness.
So data-driven decision making, more transparency and more citizen engagement uh with seamless digitalized public services.
So this is GovTech in an essence.
But the important thing is that we...
uh
see GovTech uh as an enabling uh policy which is basically cross-cutting all the different policy areas that uh governments are dealing with and therefore during the forum we have
different verticals which we dive into.
for example this year uh in the forum we will focus on various vertical
vertical sectors of policy.
One of them is the housing crisis in the European Union.
And therefore we will see, we will look at this policy area with the perspective of GovTech.
trying to understand how technology in this case and innovation can provide a contribution to try and solve the housing crisis.
uh
throughout the whole cycle of trying to solve this issue, which is uh urban planning, which is uh design and the definition of...
uh
projects, is building and maintenance, but also uh assignment and management of the use of housing.
For example, if we are talking about public housing, but it's also about how we finance uh all of this.
This is just one of the topics.
Another topic, for example, is related to
the impact of climate change on the food chain and how we make sure that we have a resilient food chain to make the Mediterranean area uh stable and resilient.
in this perspective.
And technology has a lot to do with this because we uh deal with understanding what is the impact of climate change and trying to mitigate, trying to adapt and to monitor uh
everything that is going on in terms of monitoring the environment in which the food chain is operating, but also uh
technological solutions that can help in uh having better crop management, reducing waste, so on and so forth, better distribution, and so on and so forth.
So it's public interest technology, indeed.
topic that we deal with.
These are just two of the topics we have much more at the forum.
We're talking about artificial intelligence and its adoption in the public context.
We're talking about uh how to foster.
oh
digital cooperation between Italy and Africa.
For example, we're talking about uh lots of other things and uh there is an overarching theme every year.
This year the overarching theme is new alliances.
So we are starting from this uh acknowledgement, the fact that uh we are dealing in a context where things are radically different from the past and in particular
What's different?
The geopolitical context, the relationship that we have with the natural ecosystem and the rise of the uh machine age and the artificial intelligence age that we are witnessing just
with the current hype on generative AI, but indeed uh it's a long process that started many, many years ago with the...
actually more impactful automation on manufacturing processes before disrupting the job of the white-collars, as we are seeing today.
Well, all of this context deserves, first of all, a very coordinated and deserves and requires...
to join forces, to join forces of different actors, uh public, different type of public institutions, different level of coordination among different level of governance from
national to local and above international.
uh New alliances are needed.
And if we only look at the uh geopolitical context, this is pretty evident.
we cannot take for granted the world order that has been the normal one, the one that we took for granted for uh many years, ah I would say since the end of the Second World War.
and in particular uh with the creation of the multilateral institutions, in particular the ones related with globalization of trade.
So this is just the tip of the iceberg.
But if we look at every aspect of our life, we need to rethink.
uh
the networks that we are playing with and the actors that we are dealing with.
Think of energy, think of food again, and national security and so on and so forth.
So new alliances on the geopolitical aspect, but also new alliances with nature.
uh
And uh this is a topic that I'm particularly focused on because we definitely need to uh rethink the relationship that we have been building or let's say destroying with uh the
natural services that provide uh the conditions for our own existence.
uh
This is particularly critical, in particular because natural resources most of the time are, in economic terms, public goods or at least common pool resources.
And if we take this to the global scale and we see about uh the failure of multilateralism in dealing with decarbonization, for example, because...
cannot say it differently, but it has been failing and not effective in reaching its goals.
Despite all the effort and all the hype that we have around the COP, we are not there yet in terms of cutting down the emission to zero.
even negative, which is the goal that we have to pursue if we want to keep the raise of the temperature uh below 2 Celsius.
But uh that's not the only reason why it is important.
It's because it's impacting on our everyday life because what we've been considering uh as low probability, high impact weather events, climatic events are now
high probability and therefore we witness every year heat waves on one side or uh coastal erosion or floodings or uh rain bombs and so on and so forth that we need to tackle.
uh So the relationship that we have with nature is uh fundamental because it basically uh if we destroy that we can undermine
And the third one is the relationship with machines, with AI.
uh I have to say I'm not that much concerned on that because I mean, I'm not the first one to say this, but machines have a plug and therefore we can always unplug it.
And governments have decided throughout history to...
uh
push or ban or to standardize or to shape as a part of the economy says to shape technology to shape uh industries and therefore we have the tools to do it but it's not
only about industrial policy and uh economic intervention of government in
in the evolution of innovation, which is not always good, I have to say.
uh Most of the time it's not.
uh But it's about the type of artificial intelligence that we want to build as a community.
So I see governments in this respect as...
uh
the institutions that we as human beings have formed to tackle difficult issues, issues that we cannot tackle as individuals, and we need to tackle at a community level.
So uh this is why we need to also think about the relationship between citizens, government, and machines.
Because...
Yeah.
we have changed many things throughout history.
We've changed the governance of various types of companies.
If you think about banks, there have been years in which they've been national, privatized.
ah
different shapes.
So we can do whatever we want basically as a community.
It's up to us to decide.
And the important thing is that the decision is the result of democratic process and a process that is involving the community.
Yeah of course we live in a time where a lot of things are changing and in some way we should also be scary in some way also be excited I think and and I've okay
us.
It's not given, it's not decided.
So it's up to us.
And the forum is a platform to discuss, to exchange ideas and to build something.
Yeah, mean, absolutely we need more events where to discuss about possible direction of politics in relation also with machines.
you mentioned before that Phil is an accelerator and I was thinking about, I was curious about which kind of project you're working with.
uh
this acceleration.
Yeah, yeah.
We use this term as a term GovTech in a quite uh wide perspective.
So uh we...
uh
We do not have, uh if you think about accelerators like startup programs, an acceleration program for startups, that's not what we are uh currently.
So we accelerate uh innovation in three ways.
One way is by creating knowledge and consensus.
and the conditions for decision making to take place.
with the Think Tank.
The other one is through uh working side by side with companies and public administration that want to uh implement uh innovation projects.
So we help them uh literally speeding up the adoption of innovation.
So in this way we accelerate innovation in the public system, speeding up everything from procurement to decision making to the understanding of the needs that a public
administration or a city has.
And I'm going to tell you a few examples.
uh
in a while.
And the third area is the opposite way around.
Basically, we work with uh technology vendors, technology providers, and we help them to uh build the conditions for uh their technology to be implemented by being...
decision makers and understood in terms of the technological capabilities that they can deliver.
So in this way we work as a matching platform, as an open innovation platform between the public system and tech providers.
And the third area in which we work with, which is fundamental for adoption of innovation in the context of public administration and governments, is working with citizens.
So we do uh run campaigns uh to basically uh involve citizens both in the decision making, but also in the adoption of uh
innovative public services.
This is something that often is overlooked.
So there's big effort in the m
development of innovative public services, mostly by some public administration, is focused on technology.
So I pick the best technology and I adopt it and I implement it or I let my suppliers implement it if I understand what I'm doing.
uh But there is very little focus on involving the citizens before and after.
And then what happens?
That innovation projects fail.
We are witnessing this in every field.
Smart cities, now AI, everything.
So accelerating innovation means having citizens and stakeholders in general on board.
With participatory design processes, when you design the solution, when you understand the needs and design the solutions, but also when you uh take literally sometimes hand by
hand.
uh citizens to adopt the new services or the innovations that you are proposing uh as an administration.
uh It's basically an engagement activity, a communication activity.
Call it however you want, but it's not just like advertising or pushing for...
uh
some public services, it's sometimes really about uh changing behavior.
So it's about nudging, it's about uh behavioral science, and it's really about adoption, often in an agile way, which is also something that is quite unusual for public
administration and for...
projects that happen in the public system.
Also from the perspective of companies because sometimes the process that leads to the decision is so cumbersome, is so long that you end up with...
a very strict uh statement of work and you cannot change anything and what is in there must be in there, what's not in there cannot be there or it's an extra budget and it's
often a problem to find the money.
uh Negotiation and informal negotiation cannot take place and this is a problem so we are also pushing for the reform of public procurement because public procurement processes has
been failing.
uh dramatically in ensuring that we spend money efficiently and effectively.
So there is no reason why we should keep on purchasing in the same way since it's been failing.
uh And I may be seen as a bit extreme on this, but I really think that the way public administration purchase does not protect the public interest at
currently.
uh So that's a point and I want to be very blunt on this.
uh so accelerating adoption is a work that has to deal with many, uh many aspects at different levels because we are playing with something complex, with something that has to
be tackled in a systemic way.
I was thinking about this acceleration and if you have a sort of mental roadmap about the digitalization, how much time is needed?
Like five years, ten, fifteen, twenty?
And also how do you imagine society when this will happen?
So when the public administration will use uh
to make it simpler and...
well, you know, it's very difficult to make predictions in today's context.
uh But I can say which are so.
uh I will not give uh a precise date also because it's difficult to measure the.
uh
the final outcome.
It's more of a process, but I can tell about what's going on and which are the drivers in this process.
uh Well, let's start from the fact that technologies that are uh based on uh digital technology in particular.
uh
have a characteristic uh and this characteristic is the one that digital technology is pervasive and different types of technological layers are built one upon the other.
So this leads to uh in certain areas an extreme acceleration in the uh technological development.
So uh the process that we may see as slow sometimes, it suddenly becomes extremely fast because this technology has the power to be disruptive.
So really to change the rules of what we are used to.
uh Take the definition of...
uh
disruptive innovation of Christensen.
It certainly says this in the innovator's dilemma.
it says that disruptive technologies are the ones that you don't see coming, that incumbents don't see coming through.
And governments are incumbent and don't see these technologies coming through.
But of course, they are the regulator, so they can decide when to adopt, up to a certain point, because the other driver is the
of the needs and the expectations of citizens.
So more and more having a government that is efficient and effective is, should have always been, a driver for uh consensus.
um I believe that innovation, and I am sorry to say, but innovation is not...
yet such an important topic in the relationship with uh citizens.
I'm talking about, uh in particular, in electoral...
systems.
So it's not something that really changes, that may change the result of elections, uh but it may deeply impact if something bad happens.
may the lack, I would say that is more of the lack of innovation that can lead to certain uh issues, certain problems that can uh very quickly erode the trust
that citizens give in elected officials and in government.
So this is another driver, uh rising expectations of citizens that in their private life with consumer uh applications and services are used to speed on demand, personalization
and so on and so forth.
So this is another driver.
And the third driver is what we have been witnessing with uh
so-called low probability high impact events such as or those events that we call black swans like COVID-19.
During COVID-19 we've been seeing
very fast adoption of technologies that were there, were already there since many years.
They were not adopted simply because there was no legal framework to do it.
No legal framework for remote working or at least a very weak one.
No legal framework.
Legal and uh when I say legal, I'm not talking only about uh law, but also the...
uh
practices or the soft law that many organizations have.
They didn't have policies, for example, not only in government, but in general in many companies.
But suddenly, everyone became used to...
do a meeting in a conference call or to work remotely or to sign a document remotely or to use email to do something instead of going physically into an office or to pay something
digitally.
So we can see that
say randomness or the fact that sometimes there are events that really push uh people, government companies to do something which is logical, otherwise they wouldn't do it.
But simply out of laziness and out of the...
strongest enemy of innovation, which is the idea that, we've always been doing like this.
Okay, we've always done like this.
This is sometimes uh an enemy of innovation, which is there, we don't even realize that it's there.
And in this case, with these events, with these sudden events, uh it suddenly disappears.
Yeah, sometimes yeah, suddenly like I was thinking about the I Don't remember the name now about the book of tractors them American book very famous it will come to my mind later
and it was related to how um Yeah, there always been these things about
Also, I mean, thinking about Velga and there was something about I'm doing these things because it was done in this way also before me and so on and so on.
And you know what's interesting in public administration is that sometimes the law is actually more open for innovation than the behavior of individuals.
So sometimes we see that we are fighting with uh the idea uh of certain...
uh
leaders in public administration, team leaders or directors or general managers or managers, I would say, that simply they think they are convinced that certain things
cannot be done.
But in the law, it's not written that or...
m
Maybe the law has changed and they're not aware.
They are still used to do things in a certain way.
They're not aware that there are technological opportunities that are not forbidden by the law.
Let's put it this way.
uh But they are used to do things in an old way, the usual way.
uh And sometimes you have to fight this idea.
uh
It's just a uh habit.
It's a habit of doing things in a certain way.
the idea which is rooted is, oh, we cannot do it.
It's forbidden.
uh We have to do it in a certain way.
We have to collect a certain form on paper.
You have to print it out and put it there because there is your archive.
Okay, I'm exaggerating, but...
But this is sometimes the culture or the mindset that we find.
And on one side, you know...
and this is sorry if I can I mean I think it's related to um I mean acceleration of um
of the use of technology inside the public administration.
so, yeah, I wanted to ask you if this is easy or not easy, because I can imagine that, as you say, not a lot of people are aware of the potentialities of technology.
So how does this work?
it's not easy at all, but it's not easy at all because of the exact way in which uh civil service and uh public administration are engineered for.
So they are engineered for uh reducing, uh reducing uh
the personal intervention, they are engineered for standardizing processes to make things uh all the same, okay, for everyone.
And this is a paradox because we have been used to think that uh doing the same thing for everyone is more just.
It's actually an idea of...
uh
equalitarianism, which is not equity.
Maybe equity involves more personalization in the responses that we give to citizens.
But we are rooted with this idea and it's very difficult for public administration to provide personalized answers, personalized responses to citizen needs.
They have to design services that should be
available for an open and accessible for everyone.
But nonetheless, there is a lot of failure also with this respect.
that's the idea.
technology allows for radical personalization of relationships uh and of solutions.
So this idea of the relational state, as uh Jeff Malkin calls it,
uh It's one of the main uh areas that make it difficult for uh innovation to be adopted in the public system because there is a resistance towards being more relational and uh the
idea that we need to...
uh
oh to do things in a more standardized way uh for everyone, the same solution.
So this is one thing.
And the other thing is that uh there is another barrier, which is uh the one about uh the resources available.
It's not only about uh financial resources.
Most of the time it's not because, uh I mean...
I don't believe this.
In most of the advanced economies, public sector, public sector, not the public system, we saw public administration, uh is around half of the GDP.
saying that we don't have the money, mean, is not an answer.
It's not an answer.
Of course, a lot of this money goes into wages.
civil servants, but still we have a lot of money, we're spending a lot of money, so it's a matter of where we spend the money.
And now we come to the fact that it's not only an issue of financial resources, it's an issue of uh cognitive resources, so of uh understanding which are the possibilities, what
you can do, feeling safe that you can actually do uh certain things.
things are possible, they can be done, but also that you can do things in a different way, not only different things, but things in a different way.
You can run experiments, you can uh measure what you're doing, you can learn from it, you can be transparent about this with citizens, with stakeholders, and they will better
understand because we are used to use services in beta, even to pay for them, even to pay for digital services that we know.
that are being developed in the meantime, so why not being able to accept this from a public service?
So these are the two biggest areas of resistance that I see.
Yeah, I really...
I think the same of you about there are the money.
I mean, the money there are, we just should check about how they are spent.
And also about, like when you said being transparent, I think that also from the transparency side, would be very interesting to know more about how money are spent and so
also to understand if there are money or...
Exactly.
there are certain things which are absurd.
For example, uh if you think about certain rules about procurement and the idea for which they were developed, uh one of them is the rotation of suppliers.
uh Public administration cannot purchase the same thing from the same supplier in a row.
This is a general rule.
at least in Italy for certain categories, uh unless you can justify that, blah, blah, Okay.
Now there are discussions about, should I change my email provider every three years?
Would a private company ever think about it?
Would you ever think your email provider, considering all of which is in Tate?
data migration, adoption of users.
Why?
Does it save money?
Does it save public money?
Does it make the email client software market more open?
It doesn't impact anything.
It only creates additional costs.
for taxpayers.
And it's crazy.
It's a rule that doesn't make sense if it is applied to digital services.
And we focus on this compliance uh because we are afraid that, I don't know, the idea behind is that uh whatever there is a transaction between a private company and the public
system, there is the risk of uh interference or
corruption, which is a problem.
applying this idea to digital services doesn't make sense in many cases.
While there is no concern at all about sovereignty, for example, where are the data that we put, which companies, who owns these companies?
Okay.
And therefore I would say maybe the answer is not to
go on the market.
Maybe the answer is to work with open source or maybe the answer is to develop something in house or I don't know.
But simply sometimes what I've seen is that in the public sector uh things happen because there is a lot of context.
You never start from a white page.
There is always a rule that is already there.
someone that has done things in a certain way and you cannot come and erase everything and start from scratch.
But sometimes we have to do it to make things work.
So uh this is the point.
This is the point exactly.
How do we find uh a proper way which has acceptable risks in which we can experiment?
How do we embed the idea of sandbox in the management of public goods and in the public administration?
And in all aspects, the way the name of this podcast refers to democracy, even the democratic process needs a lot of innovation because again,
There are failures in this process.
There are failures in today's context because of information and the distribution of information, not the production of information, but the distribution is heavily
concentrated.
If there is misinformation and foreign interference, if people are much more fluid in where they live with respect to where they are registered to vote, well, technology...
It's both part of the problem, but also part of the solution to improve the democratic process by allowing people to vote wherever they are.
But this requires a lot of trust.
This requires trusted services in terms of digital identity, but requires secrecy of vote, requires uh discussion about who is governing those systems, because we cannot say that
privacy exists in system, a log is always there somewhere and someone can see it.
mean, so uh there are ways in which we can build uh trustful mechanisms around this, but uh we have to think about them carefully.
We have to put the design of these systems under public scrutiny uh and then to see if they work.
try out.
Okay?
And we've been trying out many things throughout history.
This is why we are here and we are not in the caves.
uh So I think we've a bit lost this with respect to the public system where everything is crystallized or even the way things can be changed uh is very slow for several reasons.
I also think we should experiment a little bit.
Also, yeah, maybe a small step and then another small step because it's hard to change from day to night.
uh But yeah.
And now I have a question about you, about your background.
Also personal, academic, whatever.
Okay, so well, have my field of studies in economics and communication.
So I've studied communication sciences and technologies, what is called media studies in the Anglo-Saxon world.
So it's communication studies or media studies, the bachelor and then I've specialized in economics with indeed a major in marketing and
that was called at the time social responsibility which now we call sustainability uh because sometimes we need to rebrand things that don't work and try to make them work and
I've always had a passion for the public good even though I've never been involved in the first person in
but more on the the civic side.
And I've worked in innovation management for some more than 15 years with my own consulting company which then was sold to a bigger group.
I've been a managing partner there.
six years and then I decided to quit and to start Phil to bring everything that I've learned working with the private sector in the public system.
So managing innovation, doing uh digital transformation.
changing systems, complex systems.
All of these transferred to the public system, which indeed I've started to learn.
It's not only public, but more and more is systemic.
So it's made of different types of bodies, public, private, that interact together, NGOs, and so on and so forth.
because the issues that we need to tackle today are so complex that government alone cannot do it, corporations alone, of course, cannot do it, NGOs alone uh nonetheless.
this is how I came to...
It's a time of give back.
Give forward.
As you said, this is something that cannot be done alone.
if you'd like to, if you have a message for the other people that are working in similar or different fields, could be Civic Tech, GovTech, participation and so on.
Sure.
Yeah, my idea throughout all my career, it's been to build connections, building bridges rather than walls.
So I really be, and this is true in every field from the academia to business, to the concept of innovation.
through open innovation.
So my call is for uh going beyond labels and framing the problems that we are dealing with and looking at the problems, the challenges that we have in front of us as uh a community,
as human beings, and working together beyond the label of GovTech, CivicTech, uh advisory, Think Tank, uh NGO.
to sit down together at the table, uh think about approaches, and then starting to do something.
So finding occasions to put all our beautiful brains uh into practice and starting to do something.
So it's a call for collaboration.
It's a call for new alliances, which indeed is the topic of...
this year, 19 and 20 of March in Milan.
uh
Thank you Marcello, thank you a lot.
If you have anything else to add, otherwise we can...
Thank you.
It's been great to have this chat with you next time in front of a coffee.
So come and see us.
We are based in Milan, but we work all over the
Thank you again.
Thank you.