BUILD

The Building Capacities in Innovation Procurement for Cities (BUILD) project will roll out a number of training and capacity building actions targeted at upskilling the public procurers on the topic of innovation procurement. Public procurement is a powerful instrument to drive faster adoption of innovation among public sector users while simultaneously promoting economic growth by providing innovative companies opportunity for first user references. The strategic use of procurement to boost demand for innovative goods of services has become an important part of the innovation policy agenda in many EU countries, and is at the core of the new EU public procurement directive (2014/24/EU), which underlines importance of opening opportunities for public procurement of innovation (e.g. by introducing a new innovation partnership procedure). BUILD integrates the highest-quality capacity-building tools to facilitate the roll-out of capacity building and training services to cities. BUILD will engage and train public – private procurers, SMEs and startups via both onsite and online avenues on a number of topics like; 1) Guiding Principles (Valonia) 2) Legal Knowledge and Procedures (Rotterdam) 3) Preliminary market consultation (CE) 4) Pre-commercial procurement (Turku) 5) Competitive dialogue (Turku) 6) Competitive procedure with negotiation (Tartu) 7) Innovation partnership (Valonia) 8) Legal questions and considerations (Rotterdam) and 9) Risk assessment (Valonia). Lastly, BUILD will link and establish synergies with research and innovation projects funded by the EU (via Horizon Europe or other EU funding programmes), with specific focus on EU funded projects fostering PPI, with the aim of facilitating mutual learning and knowledge exchange and will also set up a pro-active dissemination action which will facilitate outreach to key target audiences, namely; public and private buyers, public-owned enterprises, SMEs and start-ups, research institutions among others.