On the 1st of September the project “InnoBuyer – Learning, sharing and co-design in innovation procurement between innovation suppliers and buyers” officially started. InnoBuyer is a coordination and support action, funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme, with a total budget of 2 million euros. The project aims to become a testing ground and benchmark towards the implementation of a demand-driven methodology that brings together procurers and innovation suppliers (notably European Innovation Council-supported SMEs), to jointly co-create solutions to common challenges proposed by procurers, while also facilitating the procurers’ adoption and the innovation suppliers’ commercialization of the solutions.
Project goals:
- Foster the development of an ecosystem to promote collaborative innovation between the best European public/private procurers and innovation suppliers (in particular, EIC-supported companies).
- Launch and validate a support programme to co-create innovation between buyers and suppliers. The programme will be demand-driven and geared to adoption by design.
- Demonstrate the increase of efficiency of EU public (but also private) services via piloting 15 innovative solutions, notably the ones from the EIC-funded companies.
It will do so by executing four sequential actions:
- Action 1: Recruitment and aggregation of procurers. The InnoBuyer consortium will launch a dissemination campaign to recruit unmet needs from procurers and then select the 15 best candidates. Other interested public and private procurers will be aggregated to the selected challenges so they can also acquire knowledge along the project.
- Action 2: Buyer-SME matching. Buyers will be supported to launch an Open Market Consultation to receive feedback on their challenges. Then, they will recruit and award suppliers to answer the proposed challenges.
- Action 3: Pilot co-creation. Procurers and suppliers will jointly co-create solutions to the challenges. The solutions will be tested and evaluated. Suppliers will receive support towards future commercialization of their solutions.
- Action 4: Terms of Reference delivery. Support the creation of ToRs in collaboration with external experts, as the base for a future tender for the solution by the procurers.
InnoBuyer has the potential to be a game-changer in the innovation procurement field by testing an agile and faster process to deliver better and more efficient public services to face societal challenges, such as climate change, pandemic crises or sustainable management of natural resources. – Miguel Gonçalves, Innobuyer Project Coordinator
The kick-off meeting of the project took place in Porto (Portugal), on the 6th and 7th of September, with representatives of the InnoBuyer consortium F6S (Ireland), CIVITTA (Estonia) and TICBIOMED (Spain) presenting their work packages and preparing the actions for the upcoming months.
Keep updated with InnoBuyer by subscribing to the newsletter on the Project’s website and following the InnoBuyer’s Linkedin and Twitter pages. Or directly contact the consortium via email at info@innobuyer.eu.