Government launches challenge to encourage hiring startups by public agencies

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Enap (National School of Public Administration), an autarchy linked to the Ministry of Economy, launched this Thursday (11) a call for public managers who want to present problems that can be resolved by the technology and innovation sector.

Using the Legal Framework for Startups —a law enacted in June this year that establishes, among other things, procedures for hiring this type of company by the public sector —, Enap wants to encourage bodies to enter into agreements of the kind and help give more legal certainty to companies related parties.

Applications can be made by Federal Executive, Legislative or Judiciary bodies and will remain open until December 5th. Six problems will be selected, to be solved by the startups chosen in the second part of the project, in the first half of 2022. The responsibility for hiring the companies will be the bodies that signed up.

The novelty was announced at the 2021 Innovation Week, an innovation event in the public sector. Applications must be made on the Desafios innovation platform.

“There is that idea that software is eating the world. It is eating the government too”, says the president of Enap, Diogo Costa. “As governments go digital, they get closer to startups.”

There are areas in which the private sector, especially innovation, does better, and that is why it is important to encourage the state to resort to partners when it needs to have certain skills, according to Costa.

“The private sector does not have the bureaucratic ties that the public sector needs to have for dealing with public money. On the other hand, private companies can fail, go bankrupt, so they take risks that the State cannot take,” he says.

The inspiration for the call was Challenge.Gov, a similar initiative by the US government. “It starts from the principle that it is necessary to invite society to help in the construction of solutions to public problems. Our program also starts from this premise”, says Costa.

The relationship between technology companies and the state is not always so collaborative, and at a time when the innovation market is heated, governments around the world have been facing pressure from large startups, such as Uber and Airbnb, in relation to regulation.

For Camila Medeiros, general coordinator of knowledge management, technology and awards at Enap, “these programs that create arenas for dialogue between the government and the market tend to improve understanding between the parties because they create a safer environment for experimentation”.

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