Customer Case

The Dutch National Police achieves 70% increase in innovation feasibility and adoption

The Dutch National Police achieve70% increase in innovation feasibility and adoption

The Dutch National Police achieves 70% increase in innovation feasibility and adoption

How the Netherlands' largest employer transformed innovation across 65,000 employees through low-code.

Industry

Government

Use Case

Portals

Innovation

How the Netherlands' largest employer transformed innovation across 65,000 employees through low-code.

Industry

Government

Use Case

Portals

Innovation

The Dutch National Police face

innovation management challenges

With over 65,000 employees, the Dutch National Police is the largest employer in the Netherlands - responsible for public safety, maintaining order, and providing assistance across the entire country. As society moves faster, orchestrating effective police work becomes increasingly complex.

At the heart of the problem was an outdated innovation process. Two full-time employees manually managed an inventory of over 1,400 innovative ideas in Excel spreadsheets that were difficult to navigate, impossible to keep current, and invisible to the rest of the organisation.

The consequences were significant. Project duplications went undetected. Real-time insights were non-existent. Communication between teams broke down. And newly implemented solutions had an adoption rate of just 20% -meaning millions of euros were lost to failed IT projects that never gained traction within the organisation.

The Dutch National Police needed more than a better tool. They needed a fundamental shift in how innovation was managed, developed, and adopted across the entire force.

With over 65,000 employees, the Dutch National Police is the largest employer in the Netherlands — responsible for public safety, maintaining order, and providing assistance across the entire country. As society moves faster, orchestrating effective police work becomes increasingly complex.

The Dutch National Police needed more than a better tool. They needed a fundamental shift in how innovation was managed, developed, and adopted across the entire force.

We now have an interactive portal that offers complete insights into all our innovations and challenges, thereby avoiding overlaps. This has a massive positive impact on operational and widespread use. The next step is to expand the use to our national and international partner organizations.

Steven Hanekroot | Product Owner at The Dutch National Police

We now have an interactive portal that offers complete insights into all our innovations and challenges, thereby avoiding overlaps. This has a massive positive impact on operational and widespread use. The next step is to expand the use to our national and international partner organizations.

Steven Hanekroot | Product Owner at The Dutch National Police

We now have an interactive portal that offers complete insights into all our innovations and challenges, thereby avoiding overlaps. This has a massive positive impact on operational and widespread use. The next step is to expand the use to our national and international partner organizations.

Steven Hanekroot | Product Owner at The Dutch National Police

Building an Innovation Portal to solve the challenge

Under the leadership of Steven Hanekroot, Product Owner at the Dutch National Police, the team turned to Betty Blocks to build an Innovation Portal - the birthplace for every application the police would go on to create. Built by a mixed team of technical staff, application owners, juniors, and citizen developer business users, the portal transformed how the organisation managed and collaborated on innovation. With real-time data functions and social capabilities - including news, chats, likes, and project updates - the portal functions across four key dimensions:

Collaborate on innovation: an intuitive board to share ideas and get support from colleagues, experts, testers and sponsors.

Increase transparency: giving every employee visibility into what's available and the status of new innovation projects.

Crowdsource solutions: a place where anyone can post a challenge in need of an innovative solution.

Connect and mobilise experts: a network function to rapidly assemble the right agile team.

To scale citizen development safely, the police built their programme on three pillars: standardisation using a unified design system, reusability of components across teams and organisations, and structured training and coaching supported by Betty Blocks. Today, 20 applications are live across six teams - with a developer pool that has grown from 400 to 1,200 builders.

Think it, build it

From prompt to prototype in minutes

Experience how fast and easy it is to turn your idea into something tangible with Betty Genius. Betty Genius is part of the Betty Blocks platform, allowing you to turn prompt-based prototypes into fully custom, enterprise-grade applications that connect to any core system.

Delivering measurable innovation results

The numbers tell the story. Innovation success rate jumped from 20% to 80% - a fourfold increase driven by better visibility, collaboration, and evidence-based development. The developer pool grew by 300%, from 400 to 1,200 active builders, as citizen developers, low-coders, and experienced developers joined forces in a BizDevOps model.

Development and maintenance costs were cut in half, freeing up significant resources across the organisation.

The Innovation Portal, now used by over 2,000 active users, eliminated project duplication, increased adoption of new solutions, and fostered a culture of collaboration that didn't exist before. Applications are built faster and smarter - with higher predictability, lower downtime, and a user experience that drives real adoption.

Innovation boost

Increase from 20% to 80% in the success of evidence-based innovation implementation.

Developer pool growth

Increased developer pool from 400 to 1,200 builders with citizen development.

Reduced costs

Development and maintenance costs reduced by 50%, achieving a 2x cost reduction.

Innovation boost

Increase from 20% to 80% in the success of evidence-based innovation implementation.

Developer pool growth

Increased developer pool from 400 to 1,200 builders with citizen development.

Reduced costs

Development and maintenance costs reduced by 50%, achieving a 2x cost reduction.

Why the Dutch National Police chose Betty Blocks

Why the Dutch Police chose

Betty Blocks

Why the Dutch National Police chose Betty Blocks

The Dutch National Police operates under some of the strictest security regulations in the country. A platform supporting their innovation programme needed to meet those standards without compromise - and Betty Blocks did.

The Betty Blocks platform team works in close collaboration with the police to ensure every deployment meets the highest security standards, particularly for on-premises solutions. Betty Blocks is now an official standard software production system within the police's software development lifecycle.

Beyond security, Betty Blocks gave the organisation something equally valuable: a path for employees to grow. From citizen developer to low-coder to experienced developer - colleagues are becoming less dependent on external partners, more empowered in their roles, and more invested in the outcomes they help build. For an organisation the size of the Dutch National Police, that kind of internal capability is what makes digital transformation stick.

Get in touch

Stop waiting for
your roadmap to catch up

Don’t let a rigid ERP stall your AI roadmap. Use the Betty Blocks orchestration layer to build the portals and autonomous agents your core systems can’t, at the speed of a prompt.

See the platform in action

Get in touch

Stop waiting for your roadmap to catch up

Don’t let a rigid ERP stall your AI roadmap. Use the Betty Blocks orchestration layer to build the portals and autonomous agents your core systems can’t, at the speed of a prompt.

See the platform in action

Think it, build it

From prompt to prototype in minutes

Build exactly what you envision with AI and low-code. Bring business and IT together to co-create applications that combine domain expertise with enterprise-grade governance.

Think it, build it

From prompt to prototype in minutes

Build exactly what you envision with AI and low-code. Bring business and IT together to co-create applications that combine domain expertise with enterprise-grade governance.