The future of Public-Purpose Technologies: Interview with StateUp's Riley Kaminer
Startups love to talk shop about their 'mission'. A new data-driven report unpacks where this chat is more than just hot air.
The mythology you hear around startups depends on who tells the story.
To their evangelists, startups are nimble, dynamic organisations, addressing critical national issues that governments cannot. To their detractors, many are symbolic of a failed economic model that doesn’t deliver for regular people: creators of solutions that are looking for problems.
Of course, as with many ‘complex and nuanced’ questions, the real truth is somewhere in between. However, startups claim to be increasingly applying their know-how to major public issues.
StateUp is examining these developments in detail. The advisory firm has recently released a report, StateUp 21, that considers the key trends in ‘public-purpose technologies’ (PPTs). PPTs, rather than serving a particular product or service, aim to address big public needs. The report, through data-driven analysis, looks at the top countries for PPT production, the key technologies being used, and the important problem areas that such technologies are being applied to.
I have enlisted the help of Principal at StateUp, Riley Kaminer, to analyse these trends further. Riley kindly responded to my questions via email, and the following conversation is a writeup of this exchange.
TW: Starter for 10. Tell us a little bit about StateUp and the latest report that you have released?
RK: StateUp is a leading international provider of public-purpose technology intelligence, research, and policy guidance. Our multidisciplinary expertise helps to bridge the often very large gap between the worlds of governance and technology innovation. We develop products and projects with governments, international organisations, technology companies, and research bodies for the wellbeing of people and the planet.
Earlier this month, we published StateUp 21. This provides a detailed analysis of key global trends in public-purpose technology – the kind of technology being engaged to address today’s most pressing public needs, from human security to greening public infrastructure – based on tens of thousands of data points.
We combine this with rigorous, independent, expert case studies of some of the most exciting up-and-coming public-purpose tech (PPT) startups in 2022. It is the first annual publication to offer both data-driven insights into the international PPT landscape and deeply researched profiles of some of the most promising PPT startups.
The report touches on the geographic distribution of these firms. Aside from the ‘usual suspects’, the likes of Brazil and Kenya have an incredibly high density of PPT startups. What do you think is the cause of this, and are these lessons replicable for other countries?
While no one policy context will necessarily produce more or higher quality PPT, our data indicates an active relationship between states deliberately engaged in their own digitalisation and in shaping a robust digital economy and the development of broader PPT ecosystems.
In StateUp 21, we highlighted a set of countries – including Brazil and Kenya – that have each, in different ways, set assertive innovation or “startup” policy in recent years designed to stimulate local technology ecosystems. In other countries (e.g., Nigeria, India, and Chile), entrepreneurs have sometimes described the development of purpose-driven technology innovation as plugging a gap in state capacity, rather than a natural complement to it.
Another key feature of your findings is that PPT startups have very close links with universities. One well-known problem in technology commercialisation is that of securing equity arrangements with the university when a company is ‘spinning-out’ of a research project.
I wonder if there is some way that PPT’s could establish a special spinout model with universities. It seems like there is a much bigger reputational incentive for universities to have been the home to a company that is instrumental in preventing future pandemics or solving carbon capture storage than the incentive there currently is to produce the next Facebook. Whether it is through smaller equity demands or PPT-specific accelerators, I think it would be wise to generate specific pathways for PPT’s to spin-out of the academy.
Big public needs require multidisciplinarity, pairing technical skills with a deep appreciation of societal needs and cultural contexts. Universities are natural launchpads for these kinds of startups, providing access to specialist and emergent talent from across different fields.
Startups connected to university ecosystems may be particularly well placed to prioritise and build for trustworthiness, which is requisite for technology with which citizens are expected to interact. Their proximity to the latest research and debate on responsible technology and technology policy can provide this additional value. But to encourage further university-born PPT innovation, particularly in the UK and Europe, there are structural and bureaucratic barriers to overcome, including questions over intellectual property rights and equity sharing arrangements.
I agree with your assertion that determining new pathways for PPT startups to spin-out of universities can have an outsized positive impact. Therefore, I’m excited about initiatives such as Spinout.fyi, which has a mission to “shed light on deal terms to catalyse a rewrite of the spinout playbook in favour of future founders” .
What are the major barriers that PPT’s face, and how can the enabling institutions around them help to address those barriers?
There are a handful of barriers that PPT startups face. First is public sector procurement. Request for Proposal (RFP) processes can move slowly, and there is often a low appetite for taking risks on innovative companies. There is a need for better time management, taking less time to prepare documents and more time to engage with the market and work on delivery.
Additionally, there are limited mechanisms for including the best available technologies or sole provider of unique technologies in public bidding processes. We would urge public sector organisations to make calls for proposals easier to find and require less effort/time for reporting.
The second barrier is the broader enabling policy environment. We notice a lack of government support in setting the conditions for de-risking the uptake of digital innovation in conservative sectors like infrastructure and the built environment. Equally, there is a critical lack of data standards and innovation-friendly regulation to set the stage for responsible experimentation.
Third, investors’ perspectives can be a barrier that PPT startups face. Investors’ measurement and anticipated timeframes for Return on Investment (ROI) don’t always match with PPT founders’ expectations. Separately, there is a need for more investment in skills and R&D in local economies.
If you were advising a smart, young generalist to go and work on one of these PPT problem areas, which would it be?
That’s a tough one! An ambitious young generalist should seek out a company or organisation whose mission resonates with them. There are so many critical PPT problem areas that the most important thing is for the young person to feel motivated by the work they are doing.
That said, if I had to pick one particular public problem area, I would probably choose urban and local tech. This vertical touches a wide range of important public problems, including social care, climate, and mobility. Urban and local tech also is very tangible, impacting citizens’ lives on a daily basis.
Finally, if people want to learn more about PPT’s and adjacent ideas, how would you recommend going about this?
At StateUp, we’re building an ecosystem of products to help people build and engage with public-policy tech. A great first port of call is to join our Nebula Community Beta. This free membership gives users access to some of our data and analysis, as well as opportunities to connect with other experts and enthusiasts and to help to shape the future of PPT.
I’d also suggest people check out the New PPT, StateUp’s ideas forum for public-purpose technology. Late last year, we published a library of content for people interested in learning more about PPT.
Riley Kaminer is a Principal at StateUp. You can follow him and StateUp on Twitter.
I came away from this conversation excited about the impact PPT’s can and will have on society. Indeed, StateUp 21 is packed with profiles of key companies that are working on pressing public problems.
One thought that I am still left with, however, is where big tech comes into this. As their ‘tech state’ status continues to sharpen, I do wonder if the likes of Meta, Amazon, Google, etc will become more active players in the PPT ecosystem.
Whether that is through buying these companies, or developing in-house capabilities themselves, I am not entirely sure. It may well be that only a company with the data scientific capabilities of Amazon will be able to increase the resilience of our supply chains to crises. Perhaps natural language processing models large enough to do universal language translation could only emerge from an actor with the machine learning momentum of Facebook. Either way, I would expect the FAANG footprint to loom large over this space. What that means, I don’t know yet.
Of the Week - My Favourites
Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show - The Philosophy of Games That is Really a Philosophy of Life
Part of my dissertation was on the ‘gamification’ of our economy, so I was delighted to return to these ideas in this episode. Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen discussed with Ezra how our information systems are now categorised by ‘point-scoring systems’, and explains what this means for the way we govern our institutions and our lives.
Youtube Video: Folding Ideas: The Line Goes Up - The Problem with NFT’s
This is long. But worth it. I am much more confident in my priors than Dan Olson (the author of this incredibly well-researched video essay) that crypto will become more than just a speculative asset, but his analysis of how narratives of hype around the future of a coin/NFT/DAO that never comes to pass is really insightful.
Song: Put Sardare Dhe - RDB ft Ranjit Mani & MC Trix
Article: James Pethokoukis - AI? CRISPR? Fusion? Can we figure out if the ‘next big thing’ is already here?