Project “PRocurement Educational Consortium for Innovation-sourcing Using Sustainability (PRECIUS)” aims to contribute to the European Green Deal objectives by connecting environmental engineers, public procurement leaders, and entrepreneurs.
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. Environmental engineering is required to develop these concepts to carry out the Green Deal objectives. 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.
Project “PRocurement Educational Consortium for Innovation-sourcing Using Sustainability (PRECIUS)” runs from 31-05-2022 until 30-05-2025 under the Erasmus+ programme, project number: 2021-2-NL01-KA220-HED-000049179.
The European Commission's support for the production of project PRECIUS content does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.