How Belfast is using procurement to unlock economic value
“Over the past decade, Belfast’s economy has become increasingly dynamic, with lots of new businesses either setting up or moving premises every month. That’s obviously good news for the city. But as a result, we’ve had great difficulty in accurately tracking which businesses should be paying rates… We needed to improve our access to up-to-date and real-time information.”Deborah Colville, Belfast City Innovation Manager and Head of the Smart Belfast programme.
A number of new approaches had been tried over the years to address the problem, but they tended to rely on slow and manual processes.
Smart Belfast
Under its Smart Belfast programme, the city launched a competition to encourage innovative companies to address the challenge. The selected companies each received £100,000 through the Northern Ireland Small Business Research Initiative which encourages businesses to bring innovation to public sector challenges.
Data scientists and other experts from the UK’s Connected Places Catapult came on board to better define the challenge and the specific outcomes the city wanted to achieve.
“We discovered that we needed to stop trying to second guess what a solution should look like, and instead focus on developing an excellent challenge definition process,” says Colville. “You need to commit to opening up your people and your data to give these businesses the chance to fully understand the complexity of the problem.”
After an open call, proof of concept and prototyping rounds, two companies – Analytics Engines and NQuiring Minds–were selected to tap into a range of data sources to help identify a solution to the challenge.
“We opened up 24 data sets across a whole range of other organisations, like Northern Ireland Water and Land and Property Services. We also provided our own council data sets such as waste collection, so we could find out if services had been accessed at particular premises,” she explains.
Half a million pounds identified
In the prototype phase the two companies identified an initial £500,000 of previously uncollected business rates, and since then, additional opportunities to collect revenue have been uncovered.
“The project really demonstrated the power of data science in helping the city to better understand a rapidly changing economy. Even ten years ago, cities could perhaps have relied on traditional methods to track such change. In the modern world this is no longer an option.”
“We’re now further developing the model to help us understand other aspects of the city, its economy and the ecology of its property market,” Colville says. “From there, we’re beginning to feed into wider city planning and decision-making, not just rates collection.”
Smart Belfast Framework
Challenge-based procurement is an integral component of the Smart Belfast Framework, first released in 2017, which established a permanent city innovation team driving innovative procurement approaches alongside traditional procurement, within the council.
“A key learning for us is the relationship between public innovation and public procurement. Right from the beginning we’ve been very aware that the public sector’s traditional approach to procurement can sometimes present a barrier to innovation, which by its nature can be difficult to predict in terms of success. So it’s very important that we work with our procurement experts in council to find ways to address these tensions.”
Since the launch of the Framework, the council’s City Innovation Team has delivered a diverse portfolio of 47 projects, leveraging funding worth over £10 million and working with over 200 SMEs and stakeholders. Projects have used a range of technology including IoT, AI, machine vision cameras, chatbots, VR and AR, satellite imagery and data analytics to tackle challenges in areas such as urban mobility, healthy living, air quality, tourism, economic development and the Covid pandemic.
The framework is also driving the development of a £120 million digital programme across the region as part of the Belfast Region City Deal, with investment in wireless infrastructure, healthy neighbourhoods, green energy and integrated mobility projects.
Removing barriers to innovation
Belfast is building on its learning to design ever more ambitious challenge fund programmes for wider societal challenges related to decarbonisation, mobility, citizen engagement and health. It is due to receive £55 million as part of the Belfast Region City Deal to support these funds in 2022.
Belfast’s innovation focus now is on its new Smart District and Innovation District – seeking to introduce digital innovation into the city and economy’s ongoing development and management from street level upwards. Essentially, it’s about the procurement of innovation.
“Procurement can be a very black and white way of looking at something in terms of customer and supplier relationship,” says Colville. “We’ve realised the best procurement should encourage a collaborative focus on outcomes – not solutionism. We’re working to harness the city’s strengths, its creativity, research and academic excellence for the long-term benefit of all our citizens.”
Connected Places Catapult launched our Challenging Procurement programme to engage with experts and representative bodies from across the public procurement ecosystem to challenge the myths surrounding public procurement, share pioneering practice, set out new pathways and outline best practice for the procurement of new and innovative solutions by the public sector. Visit our Challenging Procurement hub to learn about the support CPC can provide and discover resources which can help you procure innovation.
Sparking the innovation potential of every place
Harnessing public procurement to signal appetite for new solutions is a common trait among successful hubs of innovation. Building on our experience supporting Belfast and its regional partners, Connected Places Catapult is growing a global network of place innovation pioneers to spark the innovation potential of every place.
Join place leaders from Belfast, Bergen, Glasgow and elsewhere at the upcoming UK Innovation Places Summit to connect with others who are using public procurement and other tools to drive new economic prosperity through innovation in their areas.
Do you have a case-study to share with us and other councils?
Share your council’s innovative procurement success story and inspire others across the UK to adopt transformative approaches for their communities!
How SBRI helped Belfast City Council transform problem-solving
By leveraging the SBRI framework, the Council collaborated with small businesses to develop creative solutions for local challenges, driving efficiency and delivering impactful results for the community.
Business rates provide more than half of Belfast city council’s annual revenue, used to fund local services. However, with a constantly changing business community, the maintenance of an up-to-date register of businesses in the city to inform the timely and accurate collection of rates income can be challenging.
The small business research initiative
The Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) is an approach that brings public sector challenges together with ideas from business to create innovative solutions. According to Innovate UK, the SBRI programme has brought more than £1 Billion to the UK economy with over 66% of the contracts awarded to SME’s.
Defining the challenge
In defining the challenge, Belfast focused on what outcomes they wanted to achieve, rather than defining how they wanted to achieve them. For Belfast, these outcomes included:
- expediting the issuing of bills to new properties.
- identifying occupancy status of a non-domestic property in near real time;
- ensuring that all properties required to pay rates have been identified and are valued for rates purposes;
- identifying the function/use of a non-domestic property in near real time;
- identifying the occupant of a non-domestic property in near real time; and
- expediting the issuing of bills to new properties.
Making it happen
Working with Land and Property Services, Belfast City Council applied for £100,000 of funding from the Department for the Economy to bring forward the development of a timely, accurate and cost effective solution which could be implemented to maximise business rate revenue for the city. The council contributed a further £50,000 to the funding.
To reduce risk and allow space for innovative solutions to be developed and validated, the SBRI approach allows for a multi-stage bidding, shortlisting, validation and selection process.
Phase one: the open call
The first step was running an open call that was open to any companies interested in taking part in the competition. To kick this off, the Council developed a structured plan for market engagement which included activities such as running ‘meet and greet’ sessions open to companies interested in taking part in the competition to talk to council officers about it and get prepared. The open call was then released which was publicised in the press with a competition briefing and online application.
Phase two: proof of concept
As a result of the competition, four companies were awarded £5,000 each to help turn their ideas into more substantial proofs of concept over a six-week period. These projects focused on behavioural economics, Internet of Things networks, rule-based analytics and machine learning models. Crucially, none of the firms which responded to the open call had previously considered themselves local government suppliers.
Phase three: prototyping
Two companies — Analytics Engines and NQuiring Minds — were awarded further funding of £55,000 each to turn their concepts into functional prototypes during Phase Two. This phase ran from November 2016 to March 2017.
The companies had the opportunity to trial their new solutions over a two-week period. Using different approaches, they used a range of data sources, such as from Belfast City Council, Land and Property Services and Northern Ireland Water, to enhance the process for identifying rates income from businesses in the city.
Outcomes
During the final two-week evaluation period, the two companies identified an initial £500,000 of previously uncollected business rates. Subsequent use of the winning solution has since revealed still more previously unrealised revenue which is now being used to deliver local services.
In addition to demonstrating to Belfast City Council the value of taking a challenge-based approach to procurement, the SBRI process also gave SMEs a valuable opportunity to innovate and commercialise ideas in a real-world environment.
“Our experience of working with Belfast City Council and Land & Property Services has been invaluable, and having the opportunity to work on a city challenge directly with the service end users has been incredibly rewarding. Access to data and funding allowed us to focus fully on the challenge at hand, including the development of algorithms, which gave new insights and allowed us to propose new ways of doing things. We are now promoting our solution to a range of new markets.”Analytics Engines
Since the completion of this SBRI, Belfast City Council not only moved to procure a rates maximisation solution, but expanded its use of challenge-based procurement through the creation of the Smart Belfast Framework though which they regularly publish information about problems they are looking for the market to solve.
Do you have a case-study to share with us and other councils?
Share your council’s innovative procurement success story and inspire others across the UK to adopt transformative approaches for their communities!
Geofencing: innovative technology to improve trackside worker safety
The challenge
Solution
Next steps
How Connected Places Catapult added value
Do you have a case-study to share with us and other councils?
Share your council’s innovative procurement success story and inspire others across the UK to adopt transformative approaches for their communities!
The art of the possible
With approximately £300bn a year being spent on UK public procurement, public sector organisations have an indispensable role in fostering innovation and supporting ambitious small businesses.
The aim of this report is to help anyone engaged in making and executing public investment in new products and services fully aware of the potential for change offered by the new legislation.
Unlock transformative power
- Deploy procurement tools that help attract innovative suppliers of all sizes & build new
growth hubs. - Take advantage of the heightened awareness of the rule changes, facilitated by Government supported training, to ignite an innovation culture within your organisation
- Deploy procurement tools that help attract innovative suppliers of all sizes & build new
growth hubs.
Learn how Barnardo’s improved outcomes for children by developing innovative partnerships described as a “learning partnership rather than a traditional commissioner – provider relationship”.
Leverage new rules as enablers
- Encourage engagement with newer and more diverse solutions that embed local priorities in your procurement activities
- Learn how linking procurement with strategic planning can integrate social value, boost local economies and provide better support for startups, small and medium-sized businesses.
- Define challenging goals to energise suppliers and embed innovative thinking in your organisation.
HS2’s Innovation Accelerator assisted SMEs navigate preferred procurement platforms & supply chain frameworks, resulting in 50% securing procurement.
Exploit the competitive flexible procedure
- Achieve greater flexibility by implementing the light touch contract regime.
- Discover “The Competitive Flexible Procedure”, that encourages contract awards to be made based on the “most advantageous tender”
- Aquire funding for multi-staged procurement processes. Flowing from assessment of concepts, through development – to a final contract offer.
Transport for London (TfL) implemented the Innovative Partnership Procedure, demonstrating an effective model for boosting the local economy through innovation in public procurement.
Meet the experts
The report is co-authored by an expert team with experience in innovative legal and procurement processes and was unveiled at a House of Lords reception
Malcolm Harbour CBE
Ex-MEP
West Midlands
Served as MEP for the West Midlands for 3 Parliamentary terms 1999 – 2014. In 2008, he was Rapporteur for the first...
Julian Blake
Specialist public benefit lawyer
Stone King LLP
Julian co-authored “The Art of the Possible in Public Procurement” in 2016, to highlight the need…
Rebecca Rees
Partner / Head of Public Procurement
Trowers & Hamlins.
Rebecca Rees is a partner and Head of Public Procurement at the international law firm, Trowers & Hamlins…
Researchers
Oishee Kundu
Research Associate
University of Bath
Research Associate at the University of Bath, specialises in technology adoption and public procurement’s role in innovation.
Bin Guan
Urbanist
Connected Places Catapult
Bin Guan, an urbanist at Connected Places Catapult, bringsa town planning background and extensive experience…
Ghaith Nassar
Service designer
Connected Places Catapult
Ghaith Nassar is a service designer and researcher with the Human Connected Design team at Connected Places Catapult.
The Art of the Possible is endorsed by
Procurement in the public sector is often seen as a barrier to achieving best value rather than a path towards it. This report provides both the inspiration and the information to enable you to radically revise the way you purchase
Councillor Donald Alexander
Bristol City Council
7 Tips for Delivering Innovation in Local Government
Challenges in local government innovation
- 1. Outdated systems: Local government systems need modernisation to become more resilient and capable of adopting new technologies. While exploring shared services and joint procurement can lead to economies of scale and better resource utilisation, it was generally felt that it was questionable as to how successful shared services have been to date.
- 2. Financial constraints: Severe budget limitations hinder local governments’ ability to innovate and effectively serve citizens. Additionally, local governments struggle to attract and retain skilled personnel, often losing out to the private sector for top talent.
- 3. Data management: It was agreed that good data would be at the heart of any future innovation of local government services and here again Local Authorities are really struggling as data-sharing practices are often inefficient and, in many cases, manual. Establishing proper data standards and achieving seamless data sharing across local authorities are critical to overcoming this challenge.
- 4. Leadership and culture: Leadership is key to driving change. Local government leaders must foster a culture that embraces experimentation and accepts failure as part of the innovation process. This shift is necessary to move away from cost-based decision-making and towards value-driven procurement.
7 tips for digital leaders in local government
- 1. Know when you’re wrong: Recognise when a strategy isn’t working and be willing to pivot. For example, when Transport for London (TfL) realised that withholding data was counterproductive, they opened it up, leading to innovative uses by third parties.
- 2. Avoid hype: Stay critical of new technologies and solutions. Evaluate them against your existing needs to determine if they genuinely offer new and beneficial capabilities.
- 3. Foster a culture of experimentation: Encourage your team to try new things and view failure as a learning opportunity and part of the innovation process. This approach can lead to breakthroughs that wouldn’t occur in a risk-averse environment.
- 4. Emphasise transparency: Make procurement processes transparent and collaborative. This builds trust and attracts more innovative solutions from the market. The work of LOTI in London and CivTech in Scotland are excellent examples of what can be achieved.
- 5. Think beyond borders: Work towards seamless data sharing across local government boundaries. Residents and businesses expect consistent services, which can only be achieved through better data interoperability.
- 6. Invest in upskilling: Ensure your team has the skills needed to compete with the private sector. This may involve investing in training and development programs.
- 7. Standardise where possible: While customisation may sometimes be necessary, standardisation across local government can lead to efficiencies and cost savings. Find the right balance for your organisation.
Smart procurement is key to support Government growth plans
Britain is set to enter an exciting period for public services. Not only did last week’s King’s Speech set out 39 new Bills – several of which will have profound implications for investment in our towns, cities and for transport – but the new Procurement Act, which comes into effect this autumn, equips public sector managers to turn their everyday spending into fuel for innovation.
The UK public sector already spends more than £380bn with the private sector annually. The way that these public contracts are brought to market has the power to generate new ideas and ways of working which improve operational productivity, service outcomes and other policy priorities like the net zero transition.
Far from being a barrier to innovation, procurement is a lever to boost the delivery of the Government’s ambitious programme for growth and transformation.
Opportunities to inspire and integrate new solutions through smarter spending abound across the Government’s programme. New public agencies like Great British Railways, Great British Energy and the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority will be huge customers of goods and services, with power to shape markets.
They should each be ambitious in using their significant purchasing powers to inspire and integrate innovative products or solutions into the delivery and operations of infrastructure. Firms which engage these public bodies in solving the challenges of UK infrastructure by trialling and solving will be well placed to export their services overseas, generating wealth for UK Plc.
Not all the opportunities are in central Government and its agencies, however. Local authorities are also already major buyers of goods and services and have a strong track record in harnessing procurement to stimulate innovation in local services. Here are some examples:
- Transport for London rapidly tested nine potential suppliers using a flexible process to identify suppliers with credible solutions to reducing adverse economic impact of roadworks. Two companies emerged from the process with commercial contracts.
- Liverpool City Council used procurement to identify and introduce a new household waste collection service which saw recycling rise by 270%, reduced the cost of collection by 57% and reduced the service’s carbon footprint by 60%.
- Belfast City Council (with help from Connected Places Catapult) identified and validated a new supplier to maximise the collection of business rates, resulting in more than £1 million in annual revenues for the city.
- We are seeing many regions from Sunderland, Dorset to Glasgow using procurement as a strategic lever to bring in innovative solutions
With further devolution of powers and resources promised, all local and combined authorities should be integrating innovation-focused early market engagement mechanisms into their delivery plans which mobilise suppliers to come up with solutions to priority challenges.
Tackling the cultural barrier which limits the potential benefits of public procurement should be a priority for the new Government. A recent survey showed that only 43% of public sector workers were somewhat aware of procurement practices designed to foster innovation, while a similar number only (46%) believed that procurement can be an enabler of innovation. 10% firmly hold the opposite opinion.
Connected Places Catapult, through its initiative the Innovation Procurement Empowerment Centre (IPEC), stands ready to support the new Government’s ambitions, and to help public authorities make the most of their purchasing power.
Since 2019, we have been working with councils and research teams across the UK to raise awareness of the art of the possible in public procurement, challenge risk averse organisational culture, and empower more public authorities to be confident, articulate customers of innovation and realise the benefits.
With public sector funding under pressure, how we spend public money is more important than ever. Embracing procurement as a tool for generating new solutions can transform existing funds into fuel for innovation; to drive better, cheaper and quicker outcomes, operational productivity and policy goals such as net zero.
Putting the right procurement practices in place means bringing more innovation forward from the market, co-developing creative solutions, and using data to make intelligent decisions.
More flexible and open procedures challenge monopolies and create opportunities for new entrants to deliver disruptive solutions. Of 235 large contracts recorded on Find a Tender between January 2021 and January 2023, 20% of contracts using open competition received only one bid. Through IPEC we are determined to equip the public sector to be a more intelligent client, with more inclusive and intentional procurement practices which provide better access for providers with creative solutions, delivering in turn better outcomes for service users and better value for money for taxpayers.
Driving the agenda forwards
The availability and quality of data available to suppliers about the performance and cost of existing services is also a barrier to innovation, as is the general lack of information about pipelines of future opportunities which help suppliers to plan. Good quality information about future commercial opportunities helps suppliers to invest with confidence in developing novel solutions, while data on the performance of existing delivery helps prospective suppliers to benchmark their offerings and identify opportunities to compete.
Improvements to data transparency are included in the Procurement Act. We strongly encourage the new Government to explore ways to accelerate and extend data transparency across the public sector, thus equipping suppliers with the information they require to compete for contracts of today and to invest in solving the challenges of tomorrow.
The new administration has already made strides towards this transparency with its clear commitment to be a mission-led Government. This approach aligns well with Connected Places Catapult’s own championing of outcome, or challenge-based procurement. When engaging the market, the public sector has a tendency to prescribe how they want a contract delivered, rather than what outcome the contract is designed to achieve.
Being more outcome focused creates space for a wider range of suppliers to engage in the opportunity – including those who may never have responded to a public tender before. A flexible process then allows for validation and sifting of solutions before the final contract is awarded. Mission-led Government must be accompanied by an equal commitment to outcomes in procurement practices.
Connected Places Catapult is ready and eager to work with more senior leaders from the public sector and industry to accelerate the development and adoption of innovation in the delivery of the Government’s ambitious programme. We have the capability and experience needed to drive change, and a fast-growing community of allies.
We are keen to connect with public sector professionals who are having difficulties with navigating procurement to introduce new solutions, so we can help to unblock the problem.
Equally we want to hear about successes too, so we can amplify them to a wider audience and inspire others. Please do get in touch at ipec@cp.catapult.org.uk.
Sam Markey is Director of Place Leadership at Connected Places Catapult, and Rikesh Shah is Head of the Innovation Procurement Empowerment Centre.
Join the IPEC network.
Read: Sparking Innovation Through the Market: A Review of Pioneering Practice
Listen to Rikesh Shah discuss the future of innovation procurement on the most recent Connected Places podcast.
In-Conversation with Daniel Clarke
This week, we had the privilege of interviewing Daniel Clarke, Head of Innovation and Technology at Greater Cambridge Partnership, delving into topics on innovation, procurement, and how these strategies are applied in Cambridge.
What is a Greater Cambridge Partnership, what is your role in it, and what challenges is it trying to address?
The Greater Cambridge Partnership (GCP) is a collaboration between local councils, businesses, and academia in the Greater Cambridge area. The GCP aims to improve transport infrastructure, support economic growth, and enhance quality of life. I am part of the team which is delivering the City Deal for the area – set up to ensure that infrastructure needed to deliver the 33,500 houses set out in the current local plan, supporting 44,000 new jobs.
Congestion is one of the biggest issues facing us along with infrastructure constraints. Significant investment is being made to improve the transport system, such as building new cycle and busways as well as new travel hubs.
I am the Head of Innovation and technology and lead the Smart Cambridge Programme, exploring how data and emerging technology can make a difference to the wider programme. We pilot and trial new technologies and have taken innovation out of this stage and scaled across the area.
Can you tell us more about the Smart Cambridge Programme and how you developed and scaled it to address city challenges?
The focus of the Smart Programme has primarily been on deploying technologies that support the transport programme – helping people to get around Greater Cambridge. To do this we have built collaborative partnerships across the public and private sector.
We encourage companies to use Cambridge as a test-bed for new technologies that align with the problems we are trying to solve. A good example of this is VivaCity who trialled their first smart traffic monitoring sensors in Cambridge on our existing infrastructure. Having seen how the technology performed we have worked with them on several pieces of work. We then wanted to scale these across the city and to allow partners to easily buy sensors to add into the network and to share data. We did this through open-market procurement that would purchase the core network and developed a framework to allow the network to grow. The success is evident as we now have a network of 96 sensors. On the back of this network, we recently completed a trial of the VivaCity smart signals product.
The data from the network is integral to the wider GCP programme supporting business case development and the monitoring and evaluation of big schemes to understand the impact on local communities.
We also partner with companies on funding bids and are currently the lead partner in Connector – an autonomous bus pilot which will allow us to explore how this technology can support our ambitions to expand the public transport system. Funding bids often bring procurement challenges, particularly if the funding is allocated to the Local Authority. Generally to develop bids, we need to work with partners, often we need to procure these partners post-bid so are unable to name them in the bid document and any procurement once the grant has been secured comes at risk, as the original partner may not be successful.
We work collaboratively with academia to access cutting-edge research.
Working closely with the University of Cambridge we have built a data platform for the processing of real time data, and travel screens which have been deployed as a research project. We have also been involved in some early-stage digital twin work. At the beginning, this work tends to be unfunded or is funded through academic grants. The issue is when we want to scale the work up and invest GCP funds, procurement tends to be a barrier.
How have you used procurement to support Innovation?
We have used procurement to drive innovation. In the early days of the programme, we procured a start up to build a multi-modal, multi-operator app that had a number of innovative features. We specifically designed the procurement to support innovation in the market. Instead of specifying the exact functionality of the journey planner, we focussed on desired outcomes and made sure that the procurement was accessible for star- ups by amending our contractual terms and conditions lowering the insurance thresholds and adapting our approach to IP . This approach allowed suppliers the flexibility to propose innovative solutions that meet the end goals.
We are also currently working on a business case for Mobility as a Service and are looking to partner with another local authority who has already deployed this. Integral to these discussions are procurement colleagues who will help us to work through how we procure the solution to scale from one Local Authority area into ours.
How are you supporting Innovation in Cambridge?
We are keen to support innovation and launched our Innovation Prospectus last year, which is a call for collaboration to innovative businesses and academia to come and use Cambridge as a test bed. So, if you have an interesting innovation that can help us to solve some of the city challenges we face do please get in touch. The prospectus can be found here – Innovation Prospectus.
Finally, what have you been able to achieve to date through the Smart Cambridge Programme?
The pilots delivered by the GCP have demonstrated how Innovation has supported our ambitions to support travellers make more sustainable journeys and to keep the road network flowing.
The Vivacity Smart Signals pilot saw an improvement in traffic flows and the ability to prioritise for sustainable modes, the Starling pilot saw a 36% reduction in average pedestrian waiting times, the multi modal travel app had 2000 regular users and the network of Vivacity sensors has significantly improved our ability to develop business cases and evaluate the impact of major infrastructure schemes.
As pilots are scaled into business as usual deployments we anticipate that we will see significant benefits for local communities, supporting greater integration in the transport system, supporting more sustainable journeys and improving quality of life for residents.
Current Sentiment in the Procurement World
Growing Awareness but Limited Understanding
The Role of IPEC
Barriers to Innovation
Embedding Innovation
Benefits Realised
Key takeaways
In-Conversation with Colin Wood
We are thrilled to introduce our second “In-Conversation With” interview in the series! The initiative aims to celebrate transformational leaders across UK local authorities by sharing their expertise, success stories, and advice on implementing innovative procurement practices.
This week, we had the privilege of interviewing Colin Wood, Innovation Lead at Dorset Council, delving into topics on innovation, procurement, and how these strategies are applied in Dorset.
What is your role at Dorset Council, and what does a typical day look like for you?
I’m currently Innovation Lead. I work with others to position Dorset Council as an open, confident, forward-looking place where innovation can flourish. It’s all about maximising government and industry investment for the benefit of our people and communities.
What are the strategic goals of Dorset Council in the area of innovation?
I’m currently Innovation Lead. I work with others to position Dorset Council as an open, confident, forward-looking place where innovation can flourish. It’s all about maximising government and industry investment for the benefit of our people and communities.
We believe digital innovation presents opportunities to transform local public services plus become a real driver of our economy.
Rural Dorset is incredibly beautiful which makes it a popular holiday destination. But a tourism-based economy with seasonal, low skilled and often part time jobs is always going to be fragile.
The council’s economic strategies focus on fostering innovative sectors such as marine, agritech, defence and security that typically offer year round, higher value, skilled employment and clean growth. Interesting jobs like these provide our young people with opportunities if they want to stay local and brings in talent from elsewhere.
Building a place with an ecosystem renowned for providing innovative solutions to many of the nation’s grand challenges helps attract inward investment from government and industry. The council’s role is to provide places and spaces such as the Defence BattleLab where collaboration, co-creation and innovation can thrive.
Building an area with a reputation as a forward-looking centre of innovation can help us tell a different story about rural Dorset – a place where you can enjoy brilliant quality of life and a job that makes a real difference for the UK.
The wider social benefits of this new economy include increased social mobility, money recirculating through local supply chains, upskilling of workforces and reductions in carbon emissions.
There are also opportunities for innovation partners to support the council in meeting future challenges, whether that’s different ways to deliver social care or meeting its net zero targets.
Could you tell us about the 5G RuralDorset project, focusing on the value it unlocks for residents and businesses?
5G RuralDorset is where our digital innovation journey started. We set out to understand how next generation connectivity including 5G could help people lead safer and more prosperous lives in rural communities, even in environments as sensitive as our UNESCO-designated world heritage coastline.
The £9 million research and development project focused on themes such as public safety, economic growth, food production and solving environmental challenges. Highlights included the largest ever 5G agri and aquaculture trials, plus the world’s first standalone 700MHz 5G network along Dorset’s Jurassic Coast. This frequency range can cover longer distances over water than higher frequencies, avoiding the need for masts at sensitive locations.
We understand you’ve developed a remarkable tool called the Digital Innovation Dynamic Purchasing System (DPS), aimed at fulfilling Dorset Council’s strategic objectives. Could you provide further details about this tool and the accomplishments it has achieved so far?
Through projects like 5G RuralDorset we have developed relationships with local, national and international partners across public sector, academia, research and industry. The new Digital Innovation Dynamic Purchasing System (DPS) is one tool designed to help the council scale and diversify this ecosystem to achieve its strategic aims.
On a day-to-day level the DPS helps us identify organisations looking to work or partner with the council on digital innovation initiatives. We then publish opportunities to work with/supply to the council and its digital innovation partners.
Companies can apply to join the DPS at any time, and we have set the bar deliberately low to help early phase start-ups which can’t afford the time and expense of accessing traditional procurement frameworks.
We had 80 companies apply in the first 30 days and we have just published our first requirement. I hope the DPS can be an agile, open and transparent way to help achieve our innovation objectives.
Could you elaborate on your collaboration with JET? Additionally, why do you place such importance on innovation from start-ups?
JET Connectivity came to us as a single person start up with a fantastic idea to bring wireless connectivity to maritime environments.
Using government funding the council and its partners supported JET to launch the world’s first 5G buoy at sea in Lulworth Cove. Sensors on the buoy relayed real time sea state information to digital safety signs at popular coastal locations.
JET now employs 30 people and is a great example of the innovation we are trying to foster using our assets in Dorset. We see a very bright future for companies like JET in our region as the UK transitions to a cleaner, greener future.
What’s on the horizon in terms of innovation within Dorset Council?
We’re already involved in a couple of very interesting research projects with government and industry.
Our £7m Dorset Open Networks Ecosystem project is carrying out advanced research and development into how cutting-edge technology can transform the roll-out of mobile networks in rural areas. It’s looking at how alternative equipment can provide enhanced performance and power savings while working with a wider range of suppliers could also make the UK’s telecoms networks more secure, competitive and resilient.
And as part of a project called the Rural Connectivity Accelerator we worked with a coalition led by the Satellite Applications Catapult to identify potential pilots to help overcome barriers to mobile connectivity in rural and agricultural areas. We are waiting to see if any of the ideas will be funded and are keeping our fingers crossed for Dorset!
If you could go back in time, and give yourself one piece of advice when you first joined Dorset Council, what would it be?
This is my 24th year with councils in Dorset. Following a career in journalism I took a communications role with a Dorset council back in 2000. One of my first projects was to build the council’s first intranet and public website. People said it would never catch on!
That communications background has helped me over the years. I guess I would tell myself: “Be kind, take people with you and tell everyone what you have done. That story telling is as important as what you actually do.”
If you are interested in showcasing your journeys to innovation through procurement in our in-conversation interviews, please reach out via ipec@cp.catapult.org.uk
