Skaitmeninis knygnešys 2025: from idea to impact
On 19 June 2025, Vilnius hosted the final of Skaitmeninis knygnešys 2025, Lithuania's national selection for the World Summit Awards (WSA). Odeta Isevičiūtė gave the keynote "Nuo idėjos iki poveikio: kaip WSA nugalėtojai keičia pasaulį" ("From idea to impact: how WSA winners change the world"), hosted the event and presented the awards.
The event
Skaitmeninis knygnešys ("Digital book smuggler", after the people who smuggled Lithuanian books in during the 1864–1904 press ban) is a national contest for digital solutions. Its winners represent Lithuania in the global WSA competition. In 2025 it was organised by the State Digital Solutions Agency (Valstybės skaitmeninių sprendimų agentūra, VSSA). The final ran from 09:30 to 17:30 at Solo Society City House, Šv. Stepono g. 33, Vilnius.
21 teams reached the final. Eight were named national winners, and Vocali took Startup of the Year.
What we did there
Odeta gave a 15-minute keynote in Lithuanian (10:15–10:30), billed as host of the Edge of Impact podcast. She also hosted the event and presented the awards to the winners.
She opened with a question to the room: how many of you, when you applied, saw your project first as an impact project, and only then as a business or a government tool?
Three takeaways from the talk
1. Impact belongs to companies too
Years ago Odeta won the earlier version of the contest, "Naujasis knygnešys", and ended up at a WSA congress in Singapore among winners from around the world. She remembers asking herself what she was doing there. How could a language-learning platform compare with a service in Bangladesh where ordinary people drove neighbours to hospital, because waiting for an ambulance there could take hours?
That moment changed how she saw impact. Entrepreneurs, builders and dreamers, like the finalists in the room, create it alongside NGOs and organisations like UNICEF.
2. Sustainable impact needs a sustainable business model
Odeta has been involved with WSA since 2016 and has watched the community's thinking shift. In Singapore in 2016, hardly anyone talked about business models: impact projects were usually funded by governments or organisations. In Vienna in 2018, the big question was how to combine impact and profit, and how the world would accept impact organisations charging money to sustain themselves. In India in 2025, nobody asked anymore. In her words: "tvariam poveikiui reikalingas tvarus verslo modelis". Sustainable impact needs a sustainable business model. Period.
She also admitted the WSA community is something of a bubble. The wider world still tends to see impact as NGO territory.
3. Impact and profit can live in one company
To share these stories more widely, Odeta started the Edge of Impact podcast, where she interviews WSA winners. In the keynote she walked through several of them:
- Go Vocal started with a student's frustration over a clunky PDF form in Brussels and grew into a citizen participation platform that cities pay for.
- Colab in Brazil connects citizens who want to be heard with politicians who lacked the tools to hear them.
- naPorta delivers parcels into Brazil's favelas, where other couriers don't go, and serves major e-commerce platforms.
- Wasoko lets small shops in Africa order stock straight from suppliers through an app.
- Beewise builds AI-run robotic beehives that care for bees and rents them to growers as a pollination service.
Each of them tackles a large problem and earns money from doing it.
Congratulations to every finalist and winner, and good luck in the global WSA round.
Sources and notes
- Skaitmeninis knygnešys 2025 final event, skaitmeninisknygnesys.lt.
- The winners' stories come from Odeta's Edge of Impact podcast interviews. This post leaves out their performance figures.