 So, thanks for joining me today. This is the first time I've actually put my thoughts together about working with government. As Michelle said to you, my name is Doug Steiner. I'm Canadian. I was born in Montreal, so I got a bit of French and English, Canada and me. And I've been working in Toronto for quite a long time since the mid-80s, and I've been really focused on innovation and entrepreneurship, primarily focused on the finance area. And I want to tell you a little bit about my background, you know, and then this presentation will be done in three phases. The first one is just a bit of a setup for what I'm going to talk about. And then I'm going to get into a little bit of behavior analysis between government and industry, which I've learned over the time period that I've been working both in industry and government. And then finally just some tips and hacks in terms of both government people who are interesting in trying to forward an innovation agenda. And also the trickier part, which is businesses that actually want to sell in the government and how some of the things that you should do should, you try and fall, not fall into rabbit holes when you're trying to do that. So I'm just going to go ahead and do that. So my background is kind of unusual. I'm kind of a Swiss army knife of entrepreneur and consultant. I started my career as a financial advisor actually and then ended up very quickly on the side of the financial industry. And then I did a lot of inventing and say leading at the leading edge of finance, going back into the late 80s and 90s, and ended up running, doing a startup, taking a company public selling it and for the last 10 years I've been advising both government and industry around technology implementation. I think one of the really interesting things is a lot of businesses don't know how to use modern technology and I think for some of the fellows that are looking at being entrepreneurs and starting this is a really important thing that there's going to be a lot of ideas that are brought up in the cases of some of these lectures and one of the things I want to focus people on is there's a lot of current businesses that need modernizing not just startups trying to do something new. And then I want to make sure that this isn't too preachy a lecture I want to get some feedback from people in this process because I've been quite successful in a lot of ventures and I've also failed in a lot as well. Fortunately, I've had more successes and failures. So I'll just go ahead and so I think the primary benefits of the lecture today or just to talk about why I think it's important for government to innovate. And then just to give you some examples of what I've been doing in Canada with government and trying the innovation agenda. And I think one of the things that's really important that when you're trying to innovate in government there's got to be a good reason for it and obviously cost and public policy are really important in that. And then government always as I'm going to talk a little later always steps on policy first before they start innovating anything they just don't decide like an entrepreneur does to come up with a new idea and start stuff. And then for industry for started and corporations. What are the business anchors that you need to actually have in government to actually get some engagement and then for people, especially with smaller companies. I've had some successes with very small companies, advising and selling into government, but I've done that with partners and want to talk about that a little bit later. And I think through this lecture if if anybody wants to ask a question, please put it in the chat function or put your hand up. You know Michelle's making me honest and we'll stop this and and can stop me and then we can answer some questions as we go along so I'd like this to be as interactive as possible. So I think probably the most important thing is the behavior of government and the behavior of business is different and I just want to highlight that my backgrounds in behavioral science as well as a lot of financial technology. One thing that you should always remember if you're in government, you'll know this already is the big things are you have to basically have a policy agenda and implement policy. And then when you're doing that there, there's a risk framework that you're always working with there's risk budgeting and then there's perceived in real risk that you're taking in that government does not like taking a lot of risk and I think I need to talk about that a lot more. I also want to talk about the different levels of government because at the top New Zealand and Canada the same you have elected officials. They have an objective function of being liked and being reelected and I think that's very different from running government. And I think those two conflicts have conflicts sometimes. And then you have to basically understand government is a process driven organization. Entrepreneurs are more event driven organization and you have to basically understand that process in all government organizations drive the strategy going forward. So I want to basically start by a fun sort of way is I got an Oliver Wyman slide here, and then I, you know, when Oliver Wyman and McKinsey all these people are pitching in government they actually have all these matrix diagrams and their public private partnerships, obviously have a very kind of a focus thing on objectives. I'm trying to figure out if you can actually do what you're going to do and I'm going to talk about legislation of policy and part of this lecture. And then how do you monitor and how do you have metrics in that and then, you know, for government obviously they have to communicate what they're trying to do. And these are really, really important factors but when you look at this from a entrepreneur's lens it looks a little bit different so I basically took the Oliver Wyman thing and made one for an entrepreneur which basically said, what are your product or service and can I sell it into the government. More importantly, and the success of some very large businesses who've been bumping up regulators I think if people like Uber, DoorDash, some of these large US companies that have basically just decided that regulation is not important is what are the rules of the legislative rules and what happens if I break them and in some cases, for example in finance if you start moving money around you end up in jail, because you're going to get charged with some nefarious thing, non regulated and money laundering. In the case of Uber with taxis. It wasn't so bad and they basically ended up working with legislative and government to get their stuff done. Another important thing is when you're talking to people in government or when government people are talking to innovators outside is this whole concept of understanding of what the triggers and constraints are for each person in government it's obviously budgeting procurement there's going to be a lot of things that you can't change. There's also a lot of things you can change because once the inertia gets going in government obviously can do a lot. It's the same thing for an entrepreneur. What happens when you go into government, you start talking to people and they don't even understand what you're doing. I'll give you a good example and dealing with now. I'm working for a policy around securities regulation and a lot of the people I'm working with are very smart lawyers securities lawyers but when I start talking about decentralized finance, or crypto currency a lot of them have a basic understanding of what the point is but they actually don't understand the technology behind it so there's always issues in translation. And then I think the final thing is, who wants to listen to me and I think for government, who you're trying to innovate. Where do you go in other departments up or down and for people to listen to you and the same thing. If you're trying to sell is there somebody that wants if you're pitching to somebody want to catch what you're what you're trying to do. So, I want to talk a little bit about behavior mismatch and what governments think and how they, how they work and they, they have a decision function that doesn't change. And that that it can be a barrier to innovative decision making also innovation. What I call as popularity. When you go into a government, and you get up to the assistant deputy minister and some department that you might be wanting to sell to, or that you're working in government at policy level or working at a functional level. Yeah, you always end up with if you want to do something big you end up with the elected officials in government. And popularity is the most important thing for an elected official. I've been many times to see if, for example, the finance department, our federal finance department in Canada be interested in a new technique for, for exact tracking consumer spending. And the first question I always get asked if you actually talk to the policy people is, will my boss get reelected if he implements this new technology. The answer is no, it's great thing. I'm a good entrepreneur I find a new good business or service and I think the government should really use it, but they got they've got a needed and the need the first need is popularity. So for example in the finance area in Canada, the only need that I could find where people were actually interested in was payment remittances, where we have a lot of immigrant population that send money to the old country. And they thought that if they could change policy for payment remittances that they could get more votes, anything else they basically said, you know, we have a fire somewhere in this organization but right now we just see smoke so we don't really care about it. The other thing is, it's hard to implement things in government and is what I call implementation friction. Everybody's got a job to do governments run like a factory they don't actually run like an innovative place they've got policy in place they have programs that they're trying to implement. And if you say well I can implement this program quicker or slower or more efficiently with technology, there's still friction in that process for trying to change anything. The other thing is, government doesn't actually have a lot of metrics for some government agencies they do but for many government agencies they're not used to the new metric analysis. They're not very conversant with outreach technology for finding out if people like things or don't like things they do rely on consultants to do that live and I think that's an opportunity. The other thing in government I found is that because of the way governments set up to buy things. It's much easier for government to throw people at problems rather than technology. So, in a lot of the cases where I've tried an innovation agenda they'll say well how many people you know I said I don't need any people. I'd like to buy some technology or have new telecommunications or infrastructure for trying to find out how we can do things better in government and they say well, if you want technology we can in the case of one example I had recently. I wanted to buy some Apple products and the government that I'm working for only buys, or they said we're not an Apple shop. I actually was able to do it but it took over six months to buy some Apple products for me to work with. For, for example, for design people who actually wanted to use them. I think one of the other things is inertia government has its own tempo and for anybody that's selling into government or government that's trying to deal with innovative entrepreneurs. There's an inertia difference entrepreneurs want to move quick they want to break things I want to fail and breaking things and failing is not a big government thing they don't like doing that because they're supposed to be implementing programs and programs based on policy. And if they don't implement it properly then they, they have a problem with newspapers, telling people that in the public that they can't get the stuff done. And then the final thing I'm going to talk about is the ability and timing to legislate change some of the issues around the timing it's going to take me to go into that little more and more in a couple slides here. Popularity is really important just to drive it home. Any change that you end up in any ministry that you're trying to sell to any change when you're in the government is, will it affect the ability for the people that are leading in the elected officials to get reelected and I think this is part of the decision framework that you have to work on. And then, as I said many major innovative concepts failed in press and let unless the electorate's on board right and I'm going to get into that at the end, which is if you want to try and do stuff stuff differently, you're going to have to take your own time in the government by writing papers or doing research briefs and in as an entrepreneur trying to get into the press and on social media to start stating your case about why you think what you're doing would be beneficial for government. So I talked a little bit about implementing implementation friction I want to dig into that a little bit more. I work for the government currently in in for one of the provinces in Canada, and we have, I'm sure the federal and municipal levels and government have procurement policies. They're put in place for a very good reason there was a lot of graft and corruption in Canada with procurement favoritism. So we have very strict policies for example to do technology. We can't spend more than $25,000 twice. So to $25,000 contracts which for anybody that's in in business knows it's not a lot of money. After that, we have to go to a request for proposal. We have to have three competing bids, they have to be assessed and then the bids given based on a very strict criteria. So the most important thing that new businesses should know in any of any procurement policies they're at a complete competitive disadvantage, because a lot of procurement frameworks for the constraints have how long these people been in business. Who else have they sold to and if you're a new startup it's very very hard. I'm going to talk a little bit about that at the end. You'll find that when you're selling the government, there's a lot of government agencies that don't actually have current business expertise, a lot of people have worked in government a long time. And they lack what I call modern internal business expertise, for example, one of the issues that I've been dealing with is open source software use for technology and government it's very hard to do because there's no sales process. In any procurement process that I just talked about. For example, an RFI or an RFP process there has to be a response, obviously open source doesn't have a sales force. It's open source software so you have to actually have a consultant help you. If you're going to use open source software with some of your processes or if you're in government, and you want to try open source software. You have to fight against waterfall development processes where you have to define everything up front versus agile development processes where you're doing stuff on the fly. I think one of the other things that I found is government is very, and I'm being a bit polite here likes what I call synchronous information and in the normal parlance that means everybody gets in a room and we talk about it and I think in technology and most small businesses and many large businesses and now they're very adept at asynchronous information transfer using just like he a chef does using slack. We've got people all over the world who are fellows and we can't all have me at the same time. But I think one of the things is, for example, where I'm working slack we're not allowed to use slack we have Microsoft teams in the chat function but that the system is only saved for a couple of weeks, because we have freedom of information requests for example people don't want it. If you're having a discussion or an argument with somebody don't want to come in the public so we do use chat functions. But I think over a period of time that you'll find it that if you can work with government in an asynchronous manner it's a lot better because then you're not waiting around for people to have meetings. Finally, and just in the implementation friction that there's not a lot of use of social media and government. They're a little bit scared. I've been a big proponent of using Instagram, Facebook and some of the other social media programs and now we're getting into podcasts for example but these are all new things. Pushing information out. They're not been very good at two way communications getting feedback but I think that's going to change and that's also not an opportunity for entrepreneurs and also an opportunity for people in government to get more feedback for what they're doing. I want to stop there Michelle just I want to make sure I'm not going too fast if there's any questions or just keep going. Anyone have any questions at this point or good. Okay I think you can keep going there Doug. I don't think you're going too fast. In the people technology trade off I think this is something that's really interesting, something that I didn't really expect when I got into government. It's easier hiring a person than buying technology and I think this is something that I want to drive home in this lecture is that the government actually has a lot of technology but the run through long term contracts so for example, I don't know how far the New Zealand is going to be able to run this into using outsourced business processes or cloud computing, but there's thousands of long term contracts that the government uses to run its operations. And those contracts have development resources and they also have service resources applied to them over a long period of time. And they say we're using this program or the software, we want to keep using it even though you might be in government say there's a way better way of doing it. You have to get along a far along a road where you have to actually basically sell on a risk reduction type of process for for you to to take out a long term contract and replace it. And this happens in all business. When you put in new technology there's processing compatibility. For example, a lot of new workflow software, especially in the RP on business processing actually changes processes internally. These are something that are very beneficial for government but very hard to explain when there's a department full of lots of people and you say, you know, we actually don't need to do this work. It's not a for profit company but I think again this is one of one of the areas where there's a lot of opportunity of selling into government. Government have a government also has a problem attracting that the brightest and best there's no stock options in the government. You can't give people incentives. On the other side of the coin for a lot of people the behavior around government which is a slow process, a building where you, you know, you achieve things over a long period of time does appeal to a lot of people. A lot of people aren't super motivated by high salary for example in the technology side that rather work for the public good so there are a lot of trade offs that we have to deal with one right now when I'm working in government where we just can't hire for example data and then one of the workarounds we've done is we've been hiring co-op and engineering students, students rather than data scientists to give them some, some experience but the other side of the coin is we're getting the most modern and the best educated people out of the business right after we finish. And then just generally I've talked about this previously is that there's a lack of understanding new business processes in resource planning business process so it's starting the difference between how you develop technology where the old style would be just tell me exactly where you're going to build give me the entire library of everything you need to do versus saying we've got a problem and using open source components and then agile development processes things like using JIRA for doing tracking how things are going teaching senior people in government how these new technologies and new applications and tools are used. And then for really important stuff I'm dealing with this right now actually how you're storing data. I've introduced graph databases to the government where they're relation based for those of you who are more technologically savvy people like Facebook and Twitter keep all their data in relational graph databases which are much faster and have much better matching correlating abilities than normal relation databases. And then the final thing is you have to engage with people the way people want to be engaged with it's not it's not a very good idea to try and get something published in a academic journal or in a newspaper when everybody's getting their information through news feeds through their social media and I think just teaching and helping government and also going into government understanding the engagement strategies outreach strategies. Being able to basically do consumer journeys are very very important and might be foreign in government as well. I talked about this a little bit. Governments don't like failing that being said, I think one of the things that I want to hammer home in this lecture is, if you want to sell the government it's never upside its risk reduction and I can't state that enough, which is if you want to basically sell something in government or if you want to get something done in government, you have to attach a task risk parameters for not making the decision that you want it made. I can think of a lot of examples for this where people actually have sold very large processes and programs in the government. COVID would be an excellent example of the speed at which government changed technology and policies was almost on a weekly basis but it was all based on risk reduction. None of it was based on there was no upside in COVID except getting back to normal, but I think one of the things that I learned from working the government is they can move incredibly quickly. And then the other thing is that we're also working in an organization where if things are okay people aren't that motivated to change them and I think you've got to change the okay if you're working in government to this isn't okay because there's a way better way of doing this. And if you're selling into government. I've got a better way of doing it and you're okay ways not that good. One of the biggest problems I dealt with because I ran a bunch of businesses that tried to sell in government into government unsuccessfully is what I call a behavioral heuristic which is quite normal called status quo bias which is everything's okay. We don't want to change anything. And I can think of a status quo bias helpers in in government the way government runs for example. I'm really interested in open banking in Canada it's not going to happen because we have five large banks. They make a lot of money by having not open banking. And they're basically changing the narrative in Canada say well bankings open you can go into any bank branch and I said you know open banking from a technology standpoint isn't digitization. As far as the government knows because the government want to talk to them have said I understand bankings open their branches are open 24 hours a day and I'm like that's not open banking that changed the narrative. And I think that's something that I've done it. The other ones are in climate change where the the perception status quo which is not affecting me or the weather is not that good. It's a little bit colder today long term plans. And then when you get into established business supported networks that are keeping government programs running. There's a lot of inertia to make sure that the status quo. And then every time we try and change things in government inside of government or from outside of government there's always this question like what why should I do this with you, and I think you have to have a really good answer for that as well. Here's probably the most interesting thing that I learned from working in government which is. I tried to get the government in Canada to use debit cards for tracking people with unemployment insurance I said we could get instead of issuing a check or putting money to somebody's bank account we could issue debit cards. Pay people a little bit of extra money tell them that we're going to be creepy and follow their track and see where they're spending their money. And they thought it was a fantastic idea until I finally got to the implementation. Program manager and he said we can't do it and I said why and he said, we're not allowed to issue money on debit cards, and I said so soon. He said says the law, we have a law that says the only two ways we can send money to people are through by checking the mail or directly to the bank account. And if you want to put a deposit from unemployment insurance or social service programs on a debit card we actually have a legislative change. So what's involved in that first of all you've got an elected government that has a certain amount of legislative legislation they want to table, and most governments understand New Zealand it's a three year window and can it's a four year window. So they've got a certain amount of legislation they want to put through you've got to slide your legislation and but before you basically figure out where you're going to slide in you've got to write it, which means you've got to basically have somebody in the Justice Department or legal. If you do a private members bill, a local bill, or a government bill which is the same in Kansas is New Zealand you have to have somebody sponsor that bill and actually write it, you have to draft it, you have to send it to somebody before they've got to comment. So that that's the biggest barrier you're going to get to major change in in government is you basically a lot of things that are very innovative you have to actually have a change. And I'm going to talk a little bit about how we did a work around on that in the Canadian market. And then you also have to remember that the government is, it's like a business that has an operational cycle they have operating frameworks they have annual budgets. They actually have to push something into there and if you want to get them to buy something, or if you're in government you want to get them to spend something on money you've got to push it into a budget and operational cycle you've got to put it in a business plan. That takes time. And I guess, for a lot of startups they don't even understand the months and months it takes to get stuff done. I want to talk a little bit about my experience and I have some examples here of basically getting stuff done and I think one of the things I've been doing I'll mention a couple of businesses I've started and run, and how we actually dug ourselves into the government quite effectively. I ended up in a business a long time ago in the late 90s and early 2000s, where I was doing online trading and the banks didn't like it so what they did was something very clever. They just cut me out of the payment system in Canada which is obviously illegal. And I ended up going to the government's equivalent of the antitrust or competition bureau it's called in Canada to complain about doing this. So when I was up there I said is there any way I can prevent this from happening again they said you have to start basically getting into the public's mind what you want to do with them. They will agree with you I had a big business but there was there was forces this status quo bias and forces that wouldn't let me do it. So I decided I wanted to write and I said I'd started very simply I started writing letters to the editor for a national newspaper and end up being a columnist. And the minute I started with the pen in my hand and being a columnist of newspaper nobody ever took a shot at me again and the most powerful lesson I think I learned was, if you can drive narration of your issues and solutions in the public market. If you can and 20 years ago the only way you could do that was to be a, you know, a journalist in a newspaper, or actually have somebody do a story about what you're doing. And I found what was very important and what's super important now is there's many many ways to get your story out, and there's many ways to marry issues and I can't, you know, emphasize enough the issues, and the opportunities that social media is meant to people if they want to get their story told, starting a new business, even in government. We're starting a program where we're writing position papers and thought pieces on changes that we want to make an innovation agenda and getting some feedback. And for me, I ended up, I've got a example here of writing for a deal book which is part of the New York Times, where we were running a consulting business around behavioral science and decision making. I ended up in a business relationship with Bernie made up fortunately didn't hurt me too much, but I talked about how people don't say what they really mean in a lot of cases. And that ended up obviously when you write for the New York Times and I actually just proposed writing this article about what people think honest people should look like and what they're actually like, and how con artists believe. Another one I've got in the middle here which is one of my business partners in a major who is an academic at the works we did a lot of work. Using behavioral science techniques to get people to stop not paying their credit card. In other words trying to basically stop people from having credit card delinquency. The only way we ended up with a lot of businesses by writing a research report which ended up in the Harvard Business Review of our success in in getting people to make better decisions about paying credit and then the final one which is a very large technology and undertaking that I was a part of it that payments regulator in Canada, where we convinced the government to let the regulator actually borrow money to build modern technology and ended up spending just under $300 million modernizing the payment system. So I said the engagement test for people trying to get stuff done in government is get your word out if you want to try something different make sure there's a place that you can do it. Try and convince your boss that you want to write a paper with a co write a paper with somebody in business that talks about some of the issues that you're dealing with. Everybody likes the newspaper test I know all politicians and government people read the newspaper, but the newspaper test is the old test is now what I call the engagement test which is how many views can you get on YouTube. How many engagement, how many engagement metrics can you get through social media with Instagram Facebook, tick to twitch any of the places that are important, especially when you're trying to reach younger, younger people with discussion about these issues. I think the second thing that I've learned is, it's way easier selling into government and it's ways you're being in government and trying to change stuff if you can point to people that have already done it. And I give I'll give you three examples here. The middle one is the OSC Innovation Office which I was a co designer and and manager of until recently at the Ontario Securities Commission which is our are effectively our national regulator in Canada where we started to explain a little bit more how we got that going. But we took our cue from two other places, the financial, the FCA, which is the financial regulator in the UK, basically had an innovation hub we just called them up and said, Hey, how did you get it going. Can you give us your pitch deck that you gave to senior management. What worked and didn't work because I think a lot of stuff they did they had now have 300 people in their innovation hub. We have 15 in Ontario and then we ended up connecting with the the global innovation hub for business in Singapore which I think would be the probably the shiny example of the government basically saying, tell us how we can make this city better in this country, you know it's a city country, how we can do it and give us all the ways to do it and then actually putting capital and people behind those processes. And then, in the case of the FCA and Singapore in the USC is somebody in government didn't actually have to write a rule that just said we want a new policy. In the case of the Ontario Securities Commission where I'm just finishing up a consulting agreement project with them. They basically said we want to promote economic growth and we want to foster innovation tell us how to do it. So that was dropped in my lap and my partner's lap. Pat Chokos who works with me as a director of the Ontario Securities Commission, and we designed a very small office, and we put only two things in it we basically put an engagement group in it and then a group of lawyers and accountants that basically went and asked the government if we could get a limited time license to try new things. So we have a very complicated securities framework just like that you have in New Zealand. We said if somebody wants to come in and try and trade something we've never seen before or they want to try digital currency, or they want to try lending money against digital assets. Can we get a legal framework that we can give them relief for a certain period of time and almost any jurisdiction will give you a little bit of license to try some stuff if you get that permission from it. And that's been very successful the innovation office now has 15 people in it and we're doing our first big testing environment which we built a test lab process for it. And a sandbox to test certain types of technology that people are using in other countries to see if it works in Canada. And then the other thing is you've got to operationalize new ideas it's great to run around and pitch new ideas into government or in government pitching new ideas to your boss is you have to operationalize it and the easiest way I found to do it is to basically have a temporal community event. I'll call it that. And I said the easiest way to do it because I'm focused on technologies to have a hackathon, which have come up with a problem. I have a very small prize that I made the Elon Musk $100 million prize for carbon removal as the world's biggest one. But we did a hackathon in the government and the prize was was barely dinner for two but it was, it was for a notoriety. And we ended up with 25 firms working on three problems we ended up with a couple of incredibly smart, very small pilot, and show me from technology that people designed in a very short period of time. You can get a lot of work done by participating hackathons, but as government you can get a lot of problems solved very quickly, very innovatively and I've seen them, very smart ones done in, in climate second, second, second trace, second, second trace in credit, auditing was involved in a hackathon for that and people came up with the unbelievably smart solutions for that in a very short period of time. So I said, you know, if you give a prize and the price doesn't have to be big for an actual answer to anything you're trying to do in government. They're the best incentive for people to come and work with you. And then I want to leave you with probably the best example of innovation and government, and it's something that I've been watching very closely is Estonia, for those of you who have a satellite country of the Soviet Empire that got released in the late 90s, and they decided that they had a once in a lifetime chance to, to just build infrastructure from scratch. And I don't know if anybody's actually looked at them. They basically ended up with two very young people running the government one was 31 was 34. And they basically did two things they said okay we can use new technology, and we don't know what the hell we're doing so we're just going to hire a lot of consultants. So they basically got insiders to say okay if you were designing government from scratch, how would you do that so what they did was they said okay. You need to give everybody access so try and build up your infrastructure for interaction and telecommunications. And for those you don't know Skype was one of the outputs of that is an Estonian company was partially one of the reasons it got going so quickly. It was that it was available to all the citizens in Estonia just after they started. They basically talked about what were the two things that really, really needed to be focused on. First one was make sure educational resources were available and that the ability to learn was available online. So you're capturing a cohort of citizens between the ages of 16 and 20 but obviously government programs take seven or eight years to finish. And then what happens is you end up with acolytes that that are basically hooked on the methods that you're using, both for citizen interaction and for education. And then they worked really hard and making sure it was simple to pay your taxes for example. And they established what I call they called an innovation policy platform they basically said we have a policy of trying new things. Here are all the problems that we're trying to solve. Here's some capital come and build some businesses and we'll be your first customer and I think that was really good. The Estonia has come up with this thing that I don't know if people in New Zealand are very familiar with it but they, you can actually become a resident an electronic resident of Estonia. What you need is, it's a 30 minute application you need your own CV. So who you are or the who you are and your partners are, you need a business plan, you have to have a passport, and then you have a new passport photo and a credit card. And basically it allows you if you want to start a business in Estonia, even if you don't never ever entered the country, you can form a company there, you can basically get internet access and have a secure internet location. So for example, if you want to sell online goods and services in Estonia but Estonia is a member of the EU so it basically gives you access to the EU for doing that. And they have a very simple methodology for doing that and I would encourage people, especially people in New Zealand that are entrepreneurs that want to think about entering the EU with actually, actually being there to look at Estonia's resident process but I use that as an example of really excellent innovation and government and really good partnership with, with outside consultants also with outside businesses to get that done. I'm just going to finish up here. Just talking about the fellowship and its potentials to drive innovation with the fellows and what I'm talking about is, I think one of the most important thing is doing what I'm doing which is start telling people how to get stuff done. If people are interested in working papers around what innovation looks like in government I'm happy, and would be happy to do activity promotion and co-author papers for you have done a couple. I think this is for Michelle and her team at EHF is highlighting the features of our fellows and what they're capable of doing in government is really important. And I think as we start to engage more the EHF fellows and Edmund Hillary Institute engages more with government which they're already doing obviously especially on the integration side that we, we can tell that the story of what we're doing outside of the organization in many places and promote what we're doing because as long as government obviously is happy with what we're doing they're going to be very thrilled to work with us. So I think obviously people have opinion, they can, they can foster that opinion through social media reach engagement. There's lots of speaking and educational opportunities that I think we should be following up with. Obviously, part of the bunch of fellows I'm an investor fellow. I'm not an entrepreneur but advisory and capital application. If I'm going to put my hand up and saying I'm willing to work with a Kiwi firm. Another EHF fellow wants to talk to me about trying to figure out this and if they want capital applied to it I'm, you know I'm an investor I'm going to look at and have other people that will look at these types of opportunities. So studies are really important. If we can show the kinds of things we want to do are happening in other countries like I'm doing right now with my experience in Canada and we can replicate it in in New Zealand I think that'd be really important. And then we should actually send an invitation out and I encourage people in government to reach out to us. And I think we should be reaching out to people to say hey, is there some way we can partner with government. So the fact that New Zealand only has to really two levels of government which is very different from almost any other country you're dealing with a national or local government. And if there's if there's problems that we can solve by by doing public private partnerships. I think it's something that we should be very good at being able to do. So, Michelle that's it. I think that's my lecture I'd be happy to answer any questions. And share your stop sharing a screen. See you, Doug. If you stop sharing a screen. And then everyone can see you as well. Does anyone have any questions for Doug. Any thoughts or any reflections or anything else you wanted to dive into deeper. So I, sorry I can't hear you Michelle. Can everybody else hear me. Yeah, so everyone else can Doug so it must just be your internet connection again that's it thanks. Okay. Yeah, perfect. Okay, great. I think it was why you are sharing. Okay. Any thoughts any questions. Anything that anyone wants anyone Doug to go in a little deeper on from when. Yeah, we're from the Productivity Commission me and Nigel in New Zealand and I don't know if you know but the Productivity Commission are doing an inquiry at the moment into. Come up with ideas and recommendations about how the government can tackle persistent disadvantage. So it's from a social policy I guess perspective more than saying, well there is an economic perspective as well but in terms of innovation within government. You know we're trying to think about and explore things about really devolving things and you know government getting out of the way basically just allow people to out there in communities you sort of know what the what the issues on what needs to be done to be able to have the the latitude to be able to do that. Are there examples and look and alongside that I guess goes the budget and the funding and so on really developing that is there anything in Canada that you're aware of along those lines. I can find a couple but I think my experience has been trying to find a very small group of people that want to do an experiment. And then framing it as an experiment and saying if you're if you're picking one community for example that you're trying to do this development of policies that you can say hey we want to try this for two years. So in terms of parameters we only want to do with a certain number of people, we want to learn from this thing you can kill it. You can't kill it until the two years are up. But we want to do is report back to a year from now, and basically tell you how we're doing and then we can have another discussion so it's not like. Oh my God I have to change everything I'm doing it's like oh we're just doing this little trial over here, and we're basically going to nurture this as best we can to see what is working or, or a B testing which is what I've been doing with some of the. The trials I've been doing with the government here around engaging with consumers for example around fraud, and what are the best ways to engage it do you do it through consumer education do you do it by. You know, changing the payment processes that they make for making investments, and then instead of having one we're saying we're going to try four or five. We're going to come back and we're going to tell you the best one that works like I think that's the best way to do it, because I know when you're working in government if you say hey we want to just do this crazy thing or like no. Yeah, yeah yeah yeah starting small and then building success and building from the I think is. And then trying to build a framework which is what I did was I said we want to do a multiple execution and experiment framework not one experiment so we wanted to start a testing environment. Where we want to do multiple experiments in different things and we will come up with the first one or you come up with the first one if you're talking to your bosses, but we have one we want to try as well because I'm sure you have good ideas as well. And I think one of the things that be an experimental we have this thing called test lab I can send you some information on it. Where we actually built a business plan saying we want to test things we don't know what we want to test because we don't know what people are worried about. We don't know what the big issues are going to be but we want to have continuous cohorts of people that are coming in so what we did was we, we actually talked to the Australian securities commission, and they said don't, don't get people just to tell you give you all their ideas because you'll be overwhelmed. What you do is listen to people and say okay we're going to have a court that's going to do this or a court that's going to do that, and then every nine months we're going to start a new one. But please let us do three or four. Don't shoot the baby with the bathwater because the first one failed because the other thing you have to tell people is some of your tests are not going to work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess that would be good so I hope did that answer your question. Yeah yeah and that's very much along with what we've been you know thinking as well so. Thank you. Thanks for one Johnny you've got your hand up there and then I'll ask comes question. Hey look there's lots of different ways I could go and lots of different questions I could ask. But I've narrowed it down in my brain to two. So I work at an organization called creative HQ, which is a sort of council owns not for profit. And we've been working in this area of public sector innovation for probably about seven years. Most of our organization focus on startups but the area I work in is government. We've got one really big problem in New Zealand, in my opinion when it comes to public sector innovation and that is that no, no one owns it. You know there's no central leader and a real lack of leadership from within government around who should who should promote who should foster who should be in charge of public sector innovation. And, you know, we run some programs that Michelle's just shared the gov tech accelerator where we take a cohort of projects and sort of run them through an experimentation framework, you know, like you mentioned in a safe, repeatable way. But there's again a real lack of central ownership and then the other thing that we do is a public sector innovation measurement framework. Similar to the sort of Nordic innovation barometers that you may have heard of that we have developed New Zealand specific but again there's a real lack of central government funding for that. And I have told us hey this is really exciting we really really supportive, but we don't have any mechanism for Sunday funding system assets in the space of innovation. And it's a real problem we keep coming up with our public service commission don't want to department of internal affairs don't want to ministry of business innovation and employment don't want to. So any any advice or things around that would be hugely appreciated. Yeah, so I might my first comment is, if you could pick a person. What would that person be doing would they be an elected official or would they be a leader in business or would they be a leader at the local level who. So I wave a magic wand and say okay, you can have anybody instantly turn into your biggest fan and biggest promoter who would that be. I think it would be a central government influencer you know, maybe a politician. Perhaps the public service commission who ultimately instruct the public service and the direction taking because yeah, I believe innovation should be a core part of that and there needs to be structure and system put in place to encourage innovation and just simply. Okay, so can you finger a couple of people in that organization that would you'd like at a senior enough level that you'd like to do that, because I say what I would do let's say you picked, Mary Brown, she's like the head of public sector the policy people that are distributing what to do inside of the government. I'd write a opinion piece in the stuff or in the New Zealand Harold saying addressing her or him, and saying, we need innovation leadership. This is all the things we'd like you to do please respond to my email or please respond to my opinion piece. So there are ways you can actually get involved in it. In a kind of two way conversation and narrative around, if you're going to not do this tell me what why what are the barriers for you not doing this this is good. You can list obviously been doing this for seven years you've been doing you have all these successes to say we need a great leadership. So that's one idea. The other one would be to actually approach people if you have connections with the person that you think should do it and just sit down with them and say, if you want to, you know, help us and you want to make a name for yourself. Or if it's an elect official and nobody's taking this on saying you can be the minister of innovation if you actually form this agenda what can we do to help you do this. I think those are the two best things because you people that start leading that don't want to lead don't know they want to lead until you tell me want them to lead. So I think that would be my first advice to you was just go and say you're a leader, why don't you lead an innovation. This is, you're going to get every young voter in the country behind you so why wouldn't you do this. And I think you can make a very compelling argument for that, but it's going to take your effort and the effort of the people you're working with to basically design what it looks like. And then to go to that person and show them what their benefits personally to them of them being your basically leader going to be. Does that make sense. Yeah. So find that person or those people. Now, don't go and answer it now that my other question would be around funding and the challenges there but but I think that they're connected obviously because then all of a sudden if the government thinks it's a really good idea, or some a group of people think it's a good idea funding just fall so it's, it's really hard. It's really hard pushing money into something nobody wants to do. Johnny, I will actually connect you directly with Doug straight afterwards because I think you two actually continue to have a good conversation there. And I think Johnny actually what you're raising is very much the things we're coming across in our inquiry, you know that systems live on who in government and who do we influence and where do we find our champions and so we're very much some questions I think both we should connect. Yeah, I'll put Doug's email address in the chat that everyone too. Yeah, I'll put my email in the chat. Just in the last three minutes I'll just ask Kim's question Doug. So if you've got any specific approach to New Zealand government you've identified from participation in the HF. That was a surprise or unique to New Zealand that overseas fellows would benefit from knowing. So sorry I asked that question again it's a complicated question. Can you get your chat open. Have a read as well might be easy sometimes to read the question. Any specific approach to the New Zealand government you have identified from a position. No, I'd say no, nothing surprised me. But even the size difference it doesn't like it was such a small country. You know I actually I don't really want to answer that question because I haven't really the only my only experience with working with the government in New Zealand was trying to figure out if you know with immigration if I wanted to work in New Zealand. When I mentioned that I wanted to come and do some work down there doing the same type of work I'm doing in Canada. And I think that was my only investor or an entrepreneur and then they said oh there's this thing called the EHF, but it's, it's kind of out there. And I think that that was the only experience with them. And then actually when I dug into it it was Andre that was the first person I contacted. And I said how out there are you and then he went through what you guys are trying to do I'm like that's not out there at all. Right so I think one of the things I found it that was a bit weird. I'm talking to the these are local immigration people in the US is they didn't have a really good appreciation of what the potential of the HF was when they were pitching it. Thanks Doug, just a quick one from being are the Estonia leaders popular after the big reform. There's a lot of information on, on what's happened there but I can tell you, I do have Estonian friends, and they tell me how they operate with government and it's completely different so I think New Zealand's more advanced on tax. Estonia basically says your tax return has been filed on your behalf by the government. These are all the things that we know that you've done these are all the investments you've made and this is the income you've had. If you're returning this is how much you always please check to see if it's right versus what I do in Canada which is I take a huge pile of papers, go to an accountant, give it to them and then they basically prepare tax return I have to look at it. So I think that that is. Estonia actually implemented this almost 15 years ago so I think there's been a lot of stuff going on there. But I would say generally, when I tell people some of the, some of the interactions I have with government here, they just laugh they just said that we saw that problem. You know a decade and a half ago. Yeah, well thanks Doug. If anyone has any further questions for Doug please just email him directly or I can do an introduction. But thank you very much Doug for your time today and I know you've managed to squeeze a lot and just a little short time frame I know you've got a bigger brain and there was lots more information you could depart people so please do contact him directly if you want to actually delve into some of those topics a little bit more. Thanks Doug and now next session's coming up in the beginning of the month are from Scott Kovat which is about marketing for startups and he's doing a whole series on marketing for companies so go to our website and have a look at those. Thank you all for tuning up.