My time at CivTech®

Where in Scotland does the public sector, private sector, community, investors and third sector come together to build innovative, industry defining ideas? The answer is CivTech®.

A unique accelerator programme run by the Scottish Government that empowers public sector organisations to lay out specific challenges for private sector companies to solve. 

My name is Jack and I’m developing our answer to Challenge 6, set by National Services Scotland, “How can we transform the re-use of products for NHS Scotland?”. It was a pleasure to talk with Derek Mackay MSP (Cabinet Secretary for Finance, Economy & Fair Work) about Scotland's growing circular economy...but I wish I had worn a smarter jumper(!)

It’s estimated each that NHS Scotland spend £2 billion each year on procurement of items alone. We believe that in helping NHS Scotland to solve this challenge, we can help them to reduce their costs and environmental impacts while maximising the time that NHS staff have to focus on providing their world-class healthcare.

Ditto Sustainability will achieve this by providing cutting-edge software built by industry experts that can integrate and manage the vast amounts of data available at the NHS. Using details from their procurement, financial, and patient administration systems to create a software that can track materials as they pass through the NHS. “The Loop” will build up a live history of each item as its tracked, allowing our XAI (explainable artificial intelligence) technology to make suggestions on what should happen next to an item.

This forms a key part of NHS Scotland’s roadmap to a circular economy business model. It makes complete sense to provide this sort of information to the NHS, allowing them to make informed decisions on how best to manage their materials within the health service. How many people do you know who’ve a spare pair of crutches gathering dust at home? These crutches represent wasted resources (and spending!) and could easily be used to support another patient.

As part of the CivTech “accelerator” each company attends a series of workshops hosted by a variety of expert guest speakers, covering a range of topics including; content marketing, business planning and company ethos development. Each lecture is designed to provide the selected companies with the tools to create an MLP (“Minimum Lovable Product”) for Demo Day; 6 February 2019.

The logic that Ditto Sustainability are applying to this project has far reaching consequences for sustainability as a whole. Our core platform is systematically being developed, one resource stream at a time, to ensure businesses have advanced consultancy level tools available at their fingertips 24/7.

If you’d like to attend CivTech’s Demo Day to see Ditto Sustainability’s “The Loop” amongst 11 other pioneering projects, please get in touch.