To take tech pilots across valley of death, governments need to step up their role

As more public sector services became digitalised, the government’s role needed to evolve from just passive regulators and funders into lead customers and ecosystem builders. 

Speakers at a panel session, Lessons from Global Public Sector Leaders at the Festival of Innovation (FOI) 2026, organised by GovInsider converged on the idea that governments must look beyond their traditional narrow role as gatekeepers and financers.  

Tech-savvy and successful governments should become active shapers, users and enablers of technology.  

Global Government Technology Centre (GGTC) Berlin’s Founding MD, Manuel Kilian, said the government should be both the anchor client for GovTech solutions and the stewards of digital public infrastructure (DPI) comprising identity, payments and data sharing. 

Kilian framed public procurement as a powerful but often underused tool to channel demand towards innovative solutions. 

Government as ecosystem builder 

Agreeing with Kilian, Malaysian Research Accelerator for Technology & Innovation’s (MRANTI) Lead of IP and Policy Management, Sherry Sokmum, emphasised that the government’s role was that of a lead customer and ecosystem builder. 

To fulfil this role, governments could use instruments like sandboxes, problem statement-driven procurement and policy support. 

“The idea is to ensure public money not only funds research and development (R&D) but also delivers real social benefits and de-risks the adoption of these technologies by the private sector,” Sokmum said. 

Mongolia’s National Statistics Office Data Policy and Statistical Registration Department’s Director General, Ariunbold Shagdar, highlighted the government’s role in creating trusted data governance, interoperability and shared capabilities so that the public and private sectors could exchange data securely and build innovation on top of the data. 

Setting out clear roles 

Successful governments define clear roles, goals and dynamics: who provides digital public goods, who are anchor customers, what interoperability and standards are required, and which institutions coordinate across multiple stakeholders, Kilian noted.  

Giving an example of government acting as an anchor client and enabler of DPI, he cited the example of Singpass, where Singapore used public procurement to enable high penetration of the service, to enable private sector scaling. 

Kilian noted that while technology pilots were easier to conduct nowadays, the real challenge was in scaling (going from one to many). 

He emphasised that reduced engineering cost makes pilots common, “but this has shifted the bottleneck to adoption and institutionalisation”. 

Kilian noted that the challenges to scale from pilots to product deployment were organisational design, legal and regulatory adaptation, metrics for uptake (for example, monthly active users and user satisfaction), and governance choices. 

“Governments must build internal capacity to specify and absorb technology and focus on adoption strategies rather than only on producing more pilots,” he added. 

Government as ecosystem builder 

Sokmum noted that MRANTI’s role was that of an ecosystem builder connecting government, academia, industry, and society. 

“We advocate a quadruple helix approach where the agency acts as both problem owner and convenor to commercialise innovations and ensure societal benefit,” she said. 

Sokmum added that the major barriers to scaling pilot projects included infrastructure, [lack of] funding continuity and institutional culture. 

“When pilots end, and Treasury or procurement rules and a risk-averse culture persists, momentum is lost,” she noted. 

She recommended adjusting regulations through controlled sandboxes, strengthening cross-agency coordination, and proactively engaging public–private partners to move validated pilots into mainstream use.  

“Visible government adoption signals credibility to investors and buyers, accelerates market trust, and helps startups and R&D projects cross the valley of death,” she added. 

Defining his dream ecosystem, Mongolia’s Shagdar said it would be one with a clear national data policy, strategy and interoperable digital public infrastructure that enabled easy, secure data exchange across institutions. 

Shagdar said his focus was on the governance, standards and the institutional architecture needed to unlock data reuse and innovation rather than just technical point solutions. 

He talked about Mongolia’s Integrated Database and the adoption of administrative data management and dissemination systems. 

This resulted in practical gains such as a public services platform offering more than 100 services, improved productivity and cost savings, and the move toward receiving modifiable source code for local adaptation. 

Limited institutional knowledge 

Sharing about the Mongolian context, Shagdar identified the major barriers in scaling projects, including limited institutional knowledge, uneven technical/policy capacity across agencies and political instability that disrupts sustained support. 

He recommended strengthening shared capabilities (governance, interoperability layers, skills transformation), drafting coordinating laws and strategies for data/artificial intelligence (AI), and ensuring continuity “so pilots could be institutionalised nationwide”. 

The broad consensus was that to unlock the true potential of GovTech projects, governments needed to stop treating innovation as a string of pilots and start acting as demanding lead customers. 

Governments needed to reimagine traditional tendering processes to turn them into technology agnostic problem-driven calls to build new systems, the panellists said. 

View the full panel discussion here.