2025: Another year of innovation and impact

As 2025 draws to a close, CivTech is celebrating a year of groundbreaking projects, global recognition, and measurable impact across public services. From the success of Round 11’s Exploration Stage to landmark achievements like Forestry and Land Scotland’s new glasshouse and the Mailbox Challenge, our work continues to show that collaboration drives results. In this blog, we sit down with Mark Elliott, Head of the CivTech Division, to revisit the year’s highlights and share a glimpse of what’s ahead in 2026.

Mark Elliott, Head of the CivTech Division

How is Round 11 shaping up as the year ends?

I kinda say this every year - it almost feels like the year has only just started! As we approach 2026, while many are winding down, CivTech is still running at full speed. Round 11’s Exploration Stage has now ended, and we’re preparing for the final selection phase. The Accelerator kicks off mid-January, and between now and then we’ll complete thirty in-depth interviews, assess resubmitted proposals, make decisions with Challenge Sponsors, and handle all the legal and practical arrangements before our Day One event on January 19th.

For those invited to the Accelerator, there’s paperwork to complete and feedback to help them hit the ground running. For others, the decision will be disappointing - but reaching the Exploration Stage is a huge achievement. Out of more than 200 applications, only thirty teams made it this far. Many tell us they leave with valuable learning, new contacts, and real enthusiasm for the process. And they leave with our thanks, our best wishes for the future, and a reminder that over the years, many successful applicants did not get through on their first attempt – or even their second!

Round 11 Exploration Stage teams on Day One, held at Leith Theatre in Edinburgh.

Were there any Round 11 Challenges that you found particularly interesting or impactful?

This might seem a funny answer, but no. Let me explain…

At CivTech every Challenge is worked on with the same diligence and the same ruthless, relentless, laser focus on delivery. To do otherwise would be to devalue someone’s Challenge – something they’d like a solution to – and that simply wouldn’t sit well with us. In fact, we have a strict policy against naming ‘favourites’ - because in our eyes, every Challenge matters equally.

What’s made you proudest this year?

Ha ha ha! Well, I tend to live by the old wisdom that says, ‘pride comes before a fall’, but if you’re asking me what’s given me real pleasure this year, seeing our labours coming to full fruition, I’d have to say 2025 has given us a bumper crop.

In early August Barbara Mills – CivTech’s brilliant Deputy Programme Director – and I were fortunate enough to be present when the First Minister opened Forestry and Land Scotland’s brand new £26 million glasshouse in Newton near Elgin. Based around technology we’d developed on CivTech 4, the glasshouse will increase FLS’s capacity from 6 million saplings a year to 26 million, with a massively increased survival rate. FLS itself told us the Tape4Trees approach, augmented by other cutting-edge tech, is producing a 2,000% efficiency gain. I’ve shared more reflections on this milestone in a previous blog, which you can read here.

Barbara Mills (far right) and Mark Elliott (second from right) pictured alongside colleagues from Forestry and Land Scotland and the Tape4Trees team.

Only a few weeks later our Mailbox Challenge from CivTech Round 9 completed its post-Accelerator stage, and with contract signed went into its full delivery stage. It started out less than two years earlier with a Challenge that asked - how can technology offer everyone an individualised communications channel that is endlessly adaptable, never goes out of date, and interacts with public sector services securely and in a timely way?, and for a very small investment in the big scheme of things, once rolled out it’ll start making not only everyone’s lives a lot easier, but also save the public sector considerable amounts every year - £100 million initially, going up as more services join the system. It’ll also provide the foundations for other transformative projects such as a Scottish Government App which is currently under development, so to paraphrase Neil Armstrong, it’s one small investment for Scotland, but it’ll be a massive leap forward for everyone in Scotland…

And the Mailbox isn’t the only transformative product to emerge from CivTech 9. There’s the brilliant, super-smart Supply Chain Management System developed with Challenge Sponsor Digital Commercial Service and Supply25. The nation handles many thousands of procurements every year, from the simplest small product purchase through to huge, multifaceted, complex and complicated projects, and it’s vital these are handled efficiently, securely and quickly. But traditional procurement systems can be slow and create huge amounts of work for the buying teams as well as barriers for the suppliers – especially SMEs. Nowhere is this more apparent than supply chain management, but now with Supply25 we have, quite simply, the most streamlined and efficient proof of supply chain system in the world! I’m sure you can work out the benefits on this one.

Another success is ePass, which makes it far easier for people and businesses across Scotland to access training, guidance, and approval for the licences they need. Uptake has been strong, improving user experience and helping a home-grown company scale significantly.

Zudu, the team behind ePass, pitching on stage at CivTech Demo Day.

Finally, there’s SignPort - a mobile app connecting deaf people with British Sign Language interpreters. Booking and managing interpreters has long been a challenge, and we set out to solve it. Launched last month at SignPort’s Edinburgh offices, Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes said: “This app builds on our commitment to make Scotland a more inclusive place for deaf people. It represents exactly the kind of innovation we want to see through CivTech - technology that transforms lives and removes barriers.” The app is free to deaf users, and as a social enterprise, SignPort reinvests in the communities it serves. This is community-led innovation at its best.

CivTech has always been about squaring that circle – making people’s lives better, and helping the economy at the same time, and I’m really proud we can do this with all sorts of organisations.

The value for money on all of these is huge. I could go on and on, because the rate of success across our Challenges continually grows, with it the scale of benefits, and we have so many companies doing great things. But I’d be here until the New Year talking about everything, so I need to draw a line somewhere!

How will CivTech be driving innovation and public service reform in 2026?

We’re already developing an exciting pipeline of Challenges, with a strong focus on Public Service Reform (PSR). While everything CivTech does touches PSR, we’re exploring major moves in this area.

So to every public sector and third sector organisation out there – you know where we are, there’s plenty of time to build a Challenge with us, and you’ll be doing it with what’s acknowledged as not just the world’s first public-sector-focused innovation accelerator system, but also one that’s recognised internationally as the ‘gold standard’ amongst innovation drivers. I was out in Denmark a few weeks ago at their fantastic Beyond GovTech conference, and there were people from across the world I simply didn’t know - and often had never even heard of! - telling me how much they admired what we’re doing. It’s something Scotland can be really proud of.

Beyond Challenges, we’re also developing a wider ‘culture of innovation’ agenda for the Scottish Government. In other words, how do we drive innovation across the government in ways that permeate everything it does? For many this might be a simple encouragement for everyone to innovate (or at least try). But our deep experience of the area, and the science, tells us this is an approach that simply won’t work. So we’re hard at it, developing something that has every chance of succeeding, changing the culture to one of innovation. We’ve already got public sector organisations wanting to get involved and try out the new approaches, and 2026 could turn out to be really exciting on this front.

Richard Lochhead, Minister for Business, meeting with CivTech companies.

What lessons or experiences from 2025 will guide your approach in the year ahead?

When I took the helm, I told everyone we’d rise or fall together as a collective, and that principle still guides us. If I had to pick one takeaway from 2025, it’s this: innovation thrives when we look outward for solutions, work openly and collaboratively, focus on creating value rather than extracting it, and stand together through good times and bad. These convictions, shaped by my lifetime in innovation, are stronger than ever.

CivTech exemplifies these things…

And CivTech works.

Going forward, I think I’d simply repeat something I wrote in the piece about Forestry and Land Scotland’s Newton nursery. It goes…

The truth about innovation is that it should be - and the best innovation always is - a downpayment for a better future. And in these often-troubled times, I think that’s something worth going for.

Here’s to 2026…

And to everyone, have a great break, then come and join us. Let’s build towards CivTech’s vison of a transformed Scotland with the best public services in the world!