- 9 June 2026
- |Change, Taking risks, Technology
Part 3 of 5 short articles on just some of the many barriers faced by both public sector buyers and technologists when trying to bring inventions to market that can improve lives and save money.
Although I use technology for older people as a reference point, many of the themes I touch upon should have parallels for anyone, on either side of the table in bringing meaningful tech to the masses. For brevity quite complex themes are abbreviated in these articles, but I hope you enjoy them. Take what you want.
This is an article about the peculiarities of public sector funding, particularly in relation to technology and innovation.
It also has a focus on one particular quirk that has blighted dozens of technologists with great products and services, and time and time again prevented the public sector from seeing transformational change.
I shall introduce it by way of a short story.
My first taste of funding funniness
When I was 21 years old there were a couple of things which were certain; firstly that I had a heck of a lot more energy (and hair) than I do now and, secondly, that I really knew what I was doing when it came to computers and ‘the internet’. I had even put my abilities to use by launching a couple of my own ventures.
At that precise moment in history the internet service provision industry began to take off like a rocket – and I had the skills to work within it. A company called FreeServe had started the UK’s first non-subscription fee, dial-up internet access service. I was certain they were going to grow at a colossal rate, driven by a unique relationship with a high street retailer. I was right, they did – and they transformed UK internet access.
The epicentre of all that activity (and FreeServe itself) and the home of so many of the very best things in life (including Cluedo, puddings, tea, cricket and forthrightness) was, and still is, Yorkshire. Leeds was, back then, a veritable internet service provision rocket pad.
It was home turf for a number of startups that would go on to fundamentally change how we all got online and communicated with each other. It was my home city too.
I was offered the chance of a ground floor – “be amongst the first handful of employees” – job with one of the very best companies going. It would be fast, exciting, and I could possibly receive some share options and get rich too.
But the job ultimately eluded me – despite its huge appeal – and because of a funding quirk around my role. Remarkably, it was an issue which is also very similar to one that plagues public sector bodies when commissioning technology.
“So James, which team do you want to work in?” I was asked by an impressive guy called Dave who was a good few years older than me.
But I just couldn’t answer.
I wanted to help the technical team out. I had those skills. I wanted to work in the sales team. I had those skills. I had ideas for new products; lots of them. I simply couldn’t understand why I would need to choose one specific role when it was obvious my value was as a generalist. Why on Earth pigeon-hole me?
Dave acknowledged that I could do all those things and more, but that was not how his own funding worked. I needed to choose one job, and it would be mine. Just choose, James! There was no possibility of doing several.
He was shocked when I refused to choose (or rather couldn’t) but a little less so when I went to co-found my own venture.
We’ll come back to the core of this story in a few moments, because exactly who pays for something and out of what budget is still a big problem for both commissioners and technologists everywhere.
Three underlying truths that can block progress
If you’ve read any of my other articles in this series, it is probably obvious that I firmly believe technologies that ease the challenge of serving our older and vulnerable population should be more commonplace, much more easily and routinely procured and, in the case of the NHS and social care, prescribed like medication might be.
However, after having worked with adult social care, the NHS and social housing over the last few decades, there seem to be at least three fundamental truths when it comes to the commissioning of technology and its funding:
1) Most public sector and third sector workers do want to act as good custodians of the public purse because they’re decent citizens and want to protect the taxpayer. This is obviously largely a positive thing. But it can bring about an attitude of ‘protectionism at all costs’ and increase risk aversion to the point that transformative opportunities are missed.
2) Money is universally considered to be in short supply because GB – along with many other western economies – has a great number of simultaneous challenges to contend with. This means decision makers feel pressured to look for savings (“What can we get rid of?”) as opposed to an attitude of “What can we invest in that will make this better?”. This kills investment in prevention (that is to say, buying something that will reduce the cost and impact of a challenge in the future) because buyers cannot risk that the “return on investment” simply takes too long or cannot be quantified during their tenure.
3) Organisations (and their funders) really, really don’t like spending money on anything which they think somebody else should be paying for. On the face of it, this makes sense, but it can utterly destroy “common sense wins” that benefit the whole ecosystem and communities. Some of the best wins span multiple domains and yet we strangle them time and time again.
These three factors are nearly always present all at once. The result is inaction and a frequent failure to grasp hold of opportunities, which could be transformative for our public sector and the older and vulnerable people it serves.
I shall pass a brief comment on each of these in turn, but focus most of my attention on the third. When it comes to older and vulnerable people and how technology can help that group and, in turn our country, it is this siloed nature of the funding which strikes me as the most important issue for the public sector to overcome.
A quest for courage
On the challenge of public sector workers, protectionism and risk aversion, it is simply not their fault that they are not given adequate opportunity to become more au fait with the very technologies they’re supposed to commission. It is to be expected that someone recruited to be careful with every penny is going to be sceptical about doing anything different.
Perhaps these teams need augmenting with people with technology buying experience from other sectors? Perhaps there is training that could be made available to them, akin to leadership training, that will help them better evaluate the risks and have more courage to explore things that are new.
The reality is that changes must be driven by senior leadership, who simply must give buyers more permission and encouragement. They must also set out in extremely clear terms what leeway there is.
Hidden in our DNA
It is indisputable that the UK was once a great pioneer. Rightly or wrongly so much of the world has been shaped by our ideas, inventions and our endeavours. That is because our little seafaring nation, constantly battered by the wind and cold (at least if you live up here in the Grim North), and successive epochs of travellers landing on our shores has created an environment in which risk taking and pushing out into the unknown – taking a leap of faith – was part of our DNA.
It pains me that we may be losing this spirit of entrepreneurism. It is our ability to look at how we make things better, which is at the heart of all preventative investments.
I appreciate it’s easier to have a spirit of adventure and to go and explore new ideas from a position of financial strength. But amazing ideas also come out of hardship, out of people with real hands-on and real human experience.
Surely, somehow our country can find its way back to at least taking a few bold steps into trying to create things that help us instead of just axing what is already there? Surely a Minister, a government, an NHS trust, a social housing provider, or a local authority can find a strand of this DNA in it and move beyond the bottom line just for a moment.
Where are the real competitions?
It wouldn’t take a lot for government or other public sector bodies to run competitions aimed at innovators, entrepreneurs, and inventors to solve specific problems and then pilot those innovations with a small cohort of people (e.g. 1000). Where are the hundreds of one to three-year pilots of technologies that can deliver measurable outcomes? And surely we could stack these in favour of smaller and more innovative companies, new ventures with new ideas!
We know that right now there is huge demand on GP surgeries, especially from older and vulnerable people. Where is the £2 million cash prize and the seed funding for a dozen organisations to come up with solutions to go and fix that problem? Why are we not calling upon our nation’s entrepreneurial DNA and inventiveness?
There are big challenges. But there are also solutions to meet them which are going unseen and unused. We have no shortage of bright minds. It’s not rocket science to fix all this. It’s just a lack of leadership and a lack of confidence that investment in innovation will be rewarded.
Terribly sorry – I don’t want to help THEM
Cast your mind back a few moments to my story about Dave offering me a job but only on the basis I could work in one siloed, definable job, in one area of the business.
There is a hugely destructive parallel in the public sector. I invite all readers of this little article to challenge me if you have a different opinion or experience.
Inventors, innovators and technologists often create systems that have the potential to resolve a number of issues across a span of domains. I’m routinely approached by inventors who’ve got an idea or service that could fix several problems at once. It pains me to tell them how difficult it’s going to be.
For example, in our own venture we’ve created superb mechanisms to communicate with older and vulnerable people, offer them tailored human contact, remind and prompt them into any number of activities and help them express their views and opinions and engage with the outside world.
It has applications to help with housing related tasks (managing properties, reporting repairs), health tasks (medication compliance, social prescribing, remote medical appointments) or social care (regular check-ups, tracking of various markers). It would make a great deal of sense if one service could help with all of those things simultaneously wouldn’t it?
Well, you would think so. In reality what we’ve discovered (and I know this is the experience of lots of other founders too) is that if more than one kind of buyer becomes responsible for the purchasing, it’s inevitable that nobody will purchase it at all.
Buyers from different domains don’t always talk to each other and when they do they can’t agree on the funding split.
When we’ve pitched that product into housing, the housing sector is only willing to pay for it on the sole condition that it relates to housing management-related tasks. The sector would actually prefer that we strip out any of the other value we could create for health and social care – even if that could be delivered for free or minimal incremental cost.
When we’ve pitched it to the NHS – likewise – any suggestion that it could help other domains is often frowned upon. I’ve had similar feedback from social care teams in the past. This isn’t unique to our own products and services. I’ve heard this story time and time again.
The moment a technology, product or service starts to span multiple domains, the siloed nature of funding – this weird terror that another funder might benefit – actually squashes any hope of that product or service coming to market.
The only solution is to actually strip the technology of features so that it exclusively meets the needs of only one buyer. That, of course, is a terribly inefficient way to go about creating transformative systems.
A simple starting point perhaps
This is a very complicated issue that spans how public sector buyers work with each other, how they are funded, their protectionist nature around counting every penny, and the way both departments and individuals are targeted on that basis.
There is no simple overnight fix. But I do have an idea as a starting point.
Perhaps, when health, housing, or social care funders are approached with something that has clear, obvious, and demonstrable value to another one of those parties, as long as it is no more than 20% of the cost, they should actively encourage it. In doing so the services that you commission become a force multiplier for the rest of society.
So what if something designed for the NHS helps housing or social care in some specific way? So what if something designed for housing helps out health or other agencies, so long as that isn’t excessive? I understand that people want to protect their own budgets, but surely we need common sense.
If something like this could be adopted culturally and practically (meaning that funders are given the green light to act in this way), then it may also sow the seeds of greater collaboration, better communication, and certainly transformative outcomes for all the people we’re trying to serve.
For more articles in this series on Public Sector Technology Adoption see
Public Tech (Part 1): Why innovation & agetech adoption is so slow
Public Tech (Part 2): 5 x Critical factors to consider when commissioning innovation
Public Tech (Part 3): The three funding truths – that block innovation
Public Tech (Part 4): Treating our tech adoption sickness with a “PILL”
Public Tech (Part 5): Why chronic sickness is inevitable without “The PILL”