Amazon Web Services, EkStep forms a Joint Innovation Center (JIC); to accelerate DPI innovation

Amazon's cloud subsidiary, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has collaborated with EkStep Foundation (EkStep) to establish a Joint Innovation Center (JIC) to help foster the development of innovative digital solutions for public service delivery.  As per the company, this joint effort will focus on enabling and accelerating the creation of digital public goods (DPGs) and digital public infrastructures (DPIs). It is a customer-centric program, which encourages builders to work backwards from end-customer needs, use data to drive decision-making, and adopt an iterative approach to solution development for successful outcomes.

The JIC is formed to bring together stakeholders across the digital value chain to collaborate and develop digital public goods to drive social transformation at scale. It aims to support both public sector and commercial institutions in building and harnessing digital solutions for population-scale use while helping governments build socially and digitally inclusive economies.

“Governments and organisations serving the public at large are increasingly seeing how DPIs using cloud computing and open-source solutions can provide scalable, secure, agile, and efficient services to people, accelerating public service transformation programs”, said Shalini Kapoor, Director and Chief Technologist, AWS India Private Limited.

The company said that the JIC by AWS and EkStep will be a mechanism to bring together key stakeholders who are committed to driving digital cooperation for a more equitable and sustainable world. It will focus on supporting startups, independent software vendors (ISVs), and system integrators (SIs) to leverage the power of technologies such as cloud computing, generative artificial intelligence (AI), and analytics from AWS; help them imagine and invent new use cases for DPGs and DPIs, incubate them, and enhance existing ones; and offer comprehensive starter kits for states and countries interested in such solutions. 

To enable ease-of-use and faster adoption, the DPGs and DPIs will be packaged for one-click deployment via the AWS Partner Network (APN), which features more than 130,000 partners from more than 200 countries. AWS will also explore featuring the DPGs on AWSMarketplace, providing a global channel to showcase and distribute the solutions. The JIC further propels the scope for innovation and driving scalable impact from India, where a wide range of open-source based digital solutions have been pioneered to benefit citizens at scale.

According to Digital Public Infrastructure of India – Accelerating India’s Digital Inclusion report, the economic value addition from DPIs to India’s GDP has the potential to grow 3x – from 0.9% in 2022 to 2.9 – 4.2% by 2030.