The European Innovation Procurement Awards aim to recognise public and private buyers, natural persons and those legal entities supporting these practices across Europe in their efforts to promote and stimulate innovation procurement and the innovative ways the solutions are procured.
Innovation procurement boosts the process of transforming research results and ideas into innovative solutions. It represents an untapped potential to stimulate the demand for innovation. By using innovation procurement, the public and private sectors can provide state-of-the-art services and goods to the society and, at the same time, offer new growth and commercialisation opportunities for suppliers of disruptive solutions, particularly start-ups and SMEs.
The Awards also aims to demonstrate how innovation procurement positively transforms the economy by not only creating new and sustainable markets, but also by tackling societal challenges such as climate change.
In 2022, the second edition of European Innovation Procurement Awards is featuring three categories:
- Innovation procurement strategy category: to reward holistic and dedicated strategy/action plan that trigger sustainable innovation procurement practices.
- Facing societal challenges category: to reward those innovative procurement practises aimed to face covid-19 pandemic and/or its consequences during the recovery phase.
- Procurement leadership category: to reward the outstanding individuals and/or legal entities that create strong role models; who empower others to succeed in the use and further deployment of innovation procurement; or develop, support and promote the establishment of new innovative procurement practices within the innovation ecosystem.
Each category will reward the winner with EUR 75 000 and one runner-up with EUR 25 000.
In this respect, General Directorate of State Airports Authority, which applied in the category of “Procurement leadership”, is among the candidates who made it to the semi-finals in its category and the semi-finalists in the same category are as follows:
- Agencia de Qualitat / Avaluacion Sanitaries de Catalunya (Spain)
- DHMI (Türkiye)
- Dublin City Council (Ireland)
- Forschungszentrum Julich GMBH (Germany)
- Sardegna Ricerche (Italy)
- The Norwegian Agency for Public and Financial Management (Norway)
For the semi-final results announcement, you can reach the relevant page of the European Innovation Council from the link below:
As a result of the call, whose application date ended on 22 June 2022, the awards are planned to be given to the finalists within the last quarter of 2022.