In the European Union, public procurement by national and local authorities like provinces, municipalities, waterboards, and semi-public institutions (e.g., hospitals or universities) counts for 14% of the Gross Domestic Product (GPD), i.e., € 2 trillion every year. The European, national and local public procurement policy fosters sustainability and resilience and builds innovation capacity. It holds that European, national and local authorities aim to stimulate businesses to supply innovative goods and services sustainably.
However, these firms face difficulties in generating practical, sustainable, innovative concepts. To carry out the Green Deal objectives, environmental engineering is required to develop these concepts. Environmental engineering can define those sustainable, innovative solutions that need to be further developed and marketed by innovative suppliers, i.e., privately held firms, primarily small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and adopted by buyers. Thus, entrepreneurial SMEs have a role in transforming the insights from environmental engineering into business activities. In that way, SMEs can meet public procurement’s needs aligned with the Green Deal objectives. Further, leadership and change management processes are required to interact between the three communities. PRECIUS assumes that effective projects and programmes for innovation procurement rely on experts in each of the three communities. However, there are some gaps since environmental engineers, public procurement leaders, and entrepreneurs often do not have sufficient knowledge of the other two. There is a lack of understanding of leadership of change.
Project PRECIUS, therefore, focuses on facilitating and stimulating the interaction between three communities:
– Environmental engineers as a generator of sustainable innovations;
– Public procurement officers of sustainable innovations that increasingly face problems in acquiring sustainable innovations from the market;
– Entrepreneurs and sales personnel of privately-held firms, i.e., suppliers, mainly SMEs, that have difficulties tendering and, particularly, how to sell sustainable solutions to public authorities.
