Author: Angelica Lindqvist
At the latest GovTech4All café the spotlight turned south, to Valencia. The session featured Gema Roig, project officier at València Innovation Capital, who walked the community through how the city is turning public-sector challenges into concreate GovTech pilots and an emerging accelerator programme.
València Innovation Capital has recently joined the GovTech4All consortium, and this café offered the first in-depth look at how their approach to challenge-based procurement and ecosystem building can inspire similar efforts across Europe.
Developing the city through innovation
València Innovation Capital is the innovation strategy of the Department of Innovation of the City Council of Valencia. Its mission is simple but ambitious: “develop the city trough innovation”.
The team works closely with municipal departments to understand their real problems and translate them into solvable challenges. Technology, Gema stressed, is always “the how” – people and public value are the “why”.
Their work spans serval strategic areas:
- Sustainability and climate
- Artificial intelligence
- Wellbeing, health, sports and entertainment
- Sustainable tourism and diversity
- Smart city, GovTech and the future of work
On a day-to-day basis, this means sitting with departments, surfacing needs, scouting solutions and running pilots in real environments. Successful pilots are then brought back into the City Council as concrete, tested options for wider deployment.
This is precisely where GovTech comes in: the same mechanisms that connect problems to solutions in the city are now being used to strengthen a wider GovTech ecosystem.
The VIC GovTech programme: closing the gap to SMEs and startups
One of Valencia’s flagship initiatives is the recently launched VIC GovTech Programme, created in response to a familiar challenge: while many startups and tech-driven SMEs offer highly specialized solutions with real potential to improve public services, they often struggle to navigate traditional public procurement. The programme is designed to bridge this gap, making it easier for innovative companies to collaborate with the City Council and contribute to better public outcomes.
Its ambition is threefold: to position Valencia as a leading GovTech hub in Europe, to strengthen and connect the local ecosystem, and to support the City Council in developing open innovation processes and modern GovTeh procurement practices.
To achieve this, the programme is built on four strategic pillars. The first focuses on internal capacity building, training both València Innovation Capital and municipal departments in challenge definition, innovative procurement and new methodologies. The second is ecosystem activation, bringing startups, scaleups, research centres, universities and SMEs into the process of solving public challenges, The third pillar advances innovation-friendly procurement, introducing new clauses, procedures and evaluation criteria that make tenders more accessible while remaining fully compliant with procurement law. The fourth centres on positioning and international visibility, ensuring Valencia is recogised as an active and forward-leading GovTech player.
All these efforts come together in the VIC GovTech Innovation Lab, which structures the work into a clear four-step cycle: identifying challenges inside the City Council, scouting startups and scaleups and tendering those challenges, piloting selected solutions in real environments with municipal departments, and finally evaluating the results, sharing learnings and supporting the scaling of successful solutions.
From first idea to evaluated pilot in one year
From the first idea of the challenge to the evaluation of the pilot, it’s about one year. Example from the latest round of pilots:
- Challenges defined with departments through workshops (1 month)
- Tenders designed, reviewed by the legal department and published (2 month)
- Window for startups and SMEs to apply (1-1.5 months)
- Jury evaluation and selection (1 month)
- Pilots launched (5 months)
- Evaluation and decision on scalability (1 month)
To make participation attractive each selected solution receives €50,000 to develop a pilot demonstrator in coordination with the relevant municipal department. In the past year, Valencia has launched 13 open calls, representing €650,000 directed to startups and scaleups – with more calls now prepared for the next cycle.
How the challenge competitions work
Valencia usually runs the process as a design contest under Spain’s public contracts law, using a specific legal article that allows for project competitions. Applications are submitted via the national contracts platform and are fully anonymized.
A multidisciplinary jury of at least five members then evaluates the proposals. Depending on the topic, the committee typically includes:
- Representatives from València Innovation Capital
- One or two representatives from the relevant City Council department (the “challenge owner”)
- A member of the legal department
- Occasionally an external expert from a university, technology centre or specialist company
The city uses a standard set of around ten criteria, covering technical and financial capacity, innovation, accessibility, collaboration potential and public value. For each challenge, the criteria are adapted and weighted to fit the topic. Over time, the team has refined a reusable tender template, improving it with every new process.
For some smaller or more targeted projects, Valencia also uses a complementary approach: publishing an opportunity on an open platform, shortlisting the most promising applicants, and then inviting three to five entities by email. This method is faster but less open than the full design contest – a trade-off the team manages depending on context and urgency.
A key enabler is that València Innovation Capital is officially recognized as a innovation organization, by the Spanish Government, which allows the city to issue minor contracts up to €50,000. This creates practical room to run meaningful pilots with startups within existing procurement rules.
Six pilots bringing GovTech to life
While many of the projects are still in progress, Gema shared six concrete pilots currently under development:
- Accessible tourism at the Serranos Towers
An accessible information booth next to one of Valencia’s most emblematic historic sites, equipped with different digital tools to help visitors with disabilities experience and understand the city’s heritage. - A unified innovation dashboard
A shared platform that aggregates and visualizes innovation KPIs from València Innovation Capital, universities, startup associations and other ecosystem actors – keeping data up to date automatically. - Smarter IT incident management inside the City Council
In collaboration with the ICT department, the city is piloting Sigma IT by Focum Analytics: a help-bot that assists staff with common internal IT issues and automatically generates support tickets. - AI-powered communication support
Together with Ethic Media, València Innovation Capital’s communication department is testing an AI agent that analyses video content and automatically generates and distributes media material, easing the daily workload. - Better management of reserved parking for people with reduced mobility
The Smart City department and the Disability Office are working with Solmes on Spot4dis, an app to help people with reduced mobility quickly find available reserved parking spaces in a selected test area of the city. - AI-driven innovation grants management
The Innovation Department is piloting GrantAI by 4I Intelligent Insights – a web platform with an AI engine that supports and streamlines the evaluation of around 160+ yearly applications for innovation grants.
The coming months will focus on evaluating these pilots, assessing their impact and scalability and deciding which solutions should move toward broader deployment.
A GovTech accelerator as one-stop shop
Beyond individual pilots, Valencia is also launching the first edition of its GovTech Accelerator, designed as a public innovation one-stop shop. Its goals:
- Improve municipal public services
- Attract innovative talent to Valencia
- Strengthen the local tech ecosystem
The response has been strong: the accelerator received 73 applications, including 61 startup proposals, with 79% coming from companies founded within the last five years and most already having tested, scalable products.
Through a multi-stage selection process involving local innovation actors, 25 candidates were shortlisted, then narrowed down to 10 finalists, who are now entering the acceleration phase. The programme combines training, a demo day and a post-acceleration roadmap, running through to February.
Takeaways for the GovTech4All community
The discussion that followed the presentation highlighted serval lessons that resonate across the GovTech4All consortium:
- GovTech is organizational change as much as technology. Political commitment in Valencia has been crucial – but so is the long-term work of helping municipal staff “think in a GovTech way” in their everyday work.
- Design contests can make procurement more open and innovation-oriented, but they require time, clear legal foundations and strong internal coordination.
- Standard templates and criteria matter. Reusable tender formats and evaluation frameworks lower the barrier for departments to engage with innovative procurement.
- Hybrid procurement models create flexibility. Combining open calls with targeted invitations allows administrations to balance transparency, speed and administrative effort.
- Ecosystem building is continuous work. Valencia’s approach actively connects City Council departments (demand), startups and SMEs (supply), and the wider innovation community – with civil society also playing a role in testing and feedback.
As GovTech4All moves deeper into SGA2, Valencia’s experience offers a compelling example of how local innovation strategies and GovTech pilots can reinforce each other. By treating challenges as starting points, not obstacles, and by working systematically from idea to pilot to evaluation, cities can build their own GovTech engine – one year, and one experiment, at a time.
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This blog post highlights the key insights from the second GovTech4All Café of SGA2, where València Innovation Capital shared how a city can turn challenges into experimentation, pilots and—ultimately—systemic innovation. The discussion shed light on the practical machinery behind local GovTech: defining real needs, designing accessible procurement, activating ecosystems and building the internal capabilities that make innovation repeatable rather than exceptional.
As Europe continues to invest in collaborative pilots, startup engagement and innovation-friendly procurement, initiatives like Valencia’s VIC GovTech Programme show how cities can become engines of transformation—bridging the gap to SMEs, accelerating experimentation and creating conditions where public services evolve faster, smarter and in closer dialogue with society.