France’s digital services incubator adds seven new services to its network
The Interministerial Digital Directorate of France has onboarded seven new public services to its digital service incubation programme and published a white paper highlighting the role of state-owned incubators in stimulating innovation within government.
The French government’s network of incubators, referred to as ‘beta.gouv.fr’, has for 10 years designed digital public services based on agile methods and “guided by impact”, according to the government. Its main goal is to help public administrations build “useful, simple [and] easy to use” digital services, and its methods have been “advocated in the state’s digital strategy for all ministries and digital entities” of the state since March 2023.
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The seven new services added to the network for development include Réfugiés.info, a translation service for refugees; Mano, a service that aims to improve the lives of people living on the street and promote their reintegration; Free access, a platform that provides disabled citizens with information about public building accessibility; France Chaleur Urbaine, a platform that accelerates the connection of buildings to heating networks; France VAE, which aims to streamline access to the Validation of Acquired Experience (VAE) diploma; A-Just, a service that aims to reduce court backlogs and optimise human resources; and MySecureService, which facilitates the security and certification of digital services.
In its latest annual report, the Interministerial Digital Directorate (DINUM) said that these services would join a “selective circle of digital services with a national impact, having significantly improved the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of French people”.
The report showed that in addition to onboarding these services, three new digital service incubators have been created. These included La Ruche numérique at the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Sovereignty; the incubator of the Ministry of National Education, Higher Education and Research, and Accelema, at the engineering and technical expertise agency Cerema.
The white paper
DINUM said its white paper was “intended for public decision-makers as well as the public digital ecosystem”, and that it highlighted “the importance of state start-up incubators to stimulate innovation within the public administration fostering an intrapreneurial mindset, especially from public officials in the field”.
Jean-Baptiste Demaison, head of the French cybersecurity agency ANSSI’s Lab, added: “The deployment of the beta.gouv.fr approach in a growing number of incubators within administrations is an essential driver of innovation and public transformation.”
He said that the DINUM paper’s advocacy for innovation incubators would help spread “a culture of evaluation of the performance, impact and sustainability of products, by agile, user-centric teams driven by the achievement of objectives rather than ‘by the plan’”.
Read more: Aiming high with AI: making artificial intelligence ubiquitous across government
A suite of new products – and collaboration with Germany
The report also highlighted several new products launched in 2024.
One of these products is Docs, a tool that facilitates collaborative note-taking. Docs is the result of collaboration between the governments of France and Germany, and has been praised for providing a fully open-source offline-first alternative to Notion, a US-based productivity and note-taking web application developed by Notion Labs.
Framing the need for such services, the Docs website said that “collaborating online on text documents with people from different public or private organisations is very complicated” and that “agents” have therefore tended to use private solutions such as Office 365 and Google Docs.
Docs is currently onboarding the Netherlands and said it is “always looking for new public partners”.
Other products launched in 2024 include Compar:IA, Info Médicament, Easy Map, Mon Devis Sans Oublis. Audio description, Hedgerows, and My Justice Compensation.
About Jack Aldane
Jack is a British journalist, cartoonist and podcaster. He graduated from Heythrop College London in 2009 with a BA in philosophy, before living and working in China for three years as a freelance reporter. After training in financial journalism at City University from 2013 to 2014, Jack worked at Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters before moving into editing magazines on global trade and development finance. Shortly after editing opinion writing for UnHerd, he joined the independent think tank ResPublica, where he led a media campaign to change the health and safety requirements around asbestos in UK public buildings. As host and producer of The Booking Club podcast – a conversation series featuring prominent authors and commentators at their favourite restaurants – Jack continues to engage today’s most distinguished thinkers on the biggest problems pertaining to ideology and power in the 21st century. He joined Global Government Forum as its Senior Staff Writer and Community Co-ordinator in 2021.
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