Procure2Innovate

The Federal Procurement Agency with the PPPI Service Center has been a partner in the EU project "Procure2Innovate" from the beginning and is actively involved in shaping the content. Take a look back with us - to look ahead.

What is “Procure2Innovate”?

The "Procure2Innovate" project focuses on expanding and improving the network of competence centers for public procurement promoting innovation in the EU. Since the start in 2018 in Brussels, the project helps to establish a permanent network between the existing competence centers in Austria, Germany, Sweden, Spain and the Netherlands. One aim is to learn from each other through the exchange between the existing services and to adopt good ideas, another is to support new Competence Centers in other EU countries by providing expertise at the start.

The European Commission through the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme funds the project.

Previous achievements: a review

The project was officially launched in February 2018 in Brussels. The first tasks were discussed and distributed.
Every existing Competence Center supports a new Competence Center each year. The PPPI Service Center supported Portugal and Italy as buddy in 2018 and 2019. In 2020, it will provide advice and assistance to Greece.

Another important part of the project is the exchange of existing competence centers in peer-to-peer sessions about their services, current topics and challenges.

The network also took active roles in 2018 at the events "EcoProcura" in Nijmegen and "ECOVATION 2018" in Vienna. This enabled the events to be expanded to a broad European perspective.

The year 2019 in the Procure2Innovate project was dominated by the further development of services. The focus was to make better use of the European network that was created. Open Innovation challenges have been translated into English so that they can be promoted on the network and our customers receive more innovative solutions to their challenges. In addition, calls were promoted by the European Commission and helped with submissions. As part of the project partner meeting in Lisbon, an English language video was produced about the services of the PPPI Service Center. Some of the new Competence Centers are already established.

Workshops as support for service development or as best practice presentations are also held in the project.

These are the other goals of the project

With “Procure2Innovate”, a network is to be created that works together, builds up expertise and exchanges best practice examples. Building up expertise to facilitate cross-border cooperation and tenders is desirable.

Would you like to learn more? Discover the homepage of the project at procure2innovate.eu