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Background

The Netherlands has a way of obtaining feedback during the preparation of new policies on a national scale - the so-called MKB toets (policy/regulation check for SMEs) which includes the involvement of a panel of representatives from a certain business field.The Municipality of The Hague wants to develop and potentially scale such a process on a regional level, especially with local entrepreneurs. Currently, there is no process for validating new policies before introducing them. There is a channel to receive passive feedback or complaints once a policy has been announced. This can lead to a lengthy process of adjustments and raised dissatisfaction in the community. 

Problem Statement

The Municipality of The Hague has a yearly analysis in place of the businesses (on a branch level) that emerge and are being closed down. However, they feel a need for a deeper and better understanding of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in order to support them timely and according to the positive impact goals and the vision of the city.

Obtaining more information and ensuring that the policy-making process matches their   effort to maintain jobs and business success rates in the region is crucial since 83% of the locally registered branches operate as a one-man (woman) company.

The current business analysis lacks information on specific types of entities such as social entrepreneurship, craftsmanship, family holdings, etc. The Municipality of The Hague wants to utilise the policy validation process to offer assistance to businesses in becoming more sustainable, more inclusive, more efficient in their energy consumption, and more circular in their use of resources, to name a few.

Mapping the Challenge

​How ​can ​we ​help ​municipality employees who ​struggle to identify and analyze how a newly proposed policy might impact entrepreneurs, to scrape the net, map out and select local businesses with up-to-date contact details to reach out to, ​instead ​of waiting for feedback and complications post-publication?

Sub-questions

• How can we obtain the most recent digital status and contact information of a business (without a website/hosted on a social media platform/ etc,)?
• How can we map out which local entrepreneurs collaborate with each other?
• Can the businesses be evaluated on their energy/resource efficiency? (energy, waste management, etc.)
• How can we analyze and validate business claims on sustainability and inclusivity developments over time? (post a specific moment of self-reporting)
• How can we ensure that these checks of up-to-date business status can be verified with the business owner to prevent misuse and misinformation in the future? (example: someone makes a website for a business that they do not represent)

Criteria

• The proof of concept should allow for entering a policy formulation in the tool.
• The tool should analyze internally and externally retrieved information to cluster and provide insights into the various business groups.
• The output should be updated (preferably) during every search based on a new draft policy version.
• The tool should provide an overview of suggested groups and sectors of interest to this specific policy.
• The proof of concept should allow for identifying entrepreneurs to be invited to provide input for policymaking and validation tests.
• The tool should enable the municipality employee to link a result to their contact details in a safer manner to be able to reach out and gather insights.
• The tool should have the function to copy and export results per policy analysis.
• The proof of concept could potentially indicate how many of the entrepreneurs don't have a website, are active or not online, or need digitalization guidance in order to be better equipped to participate in future policy validations
• The tool could focus on enabling the municipality employees to indicate a preference or search for entrepreneurs who are/can be more resilient, sustainable, inclusive, collaborative, etc.
• The proof of concept could be demonstrated and scaled/adapted to other municipalities.
• Later on: verification loop to ensure that no misuse is enabled during the scraping of external data. Indicator whether or not a new update matches your business.
• Later on: possibility to have the results connected to the yearly dashboard and transform it into quarterly business analysis indicating the status of jobs and success rates (before/after changes and new policy introductions)