This year in the category “Innovation Procurement of the Year”, the Procura+ Awards have selected two finalists: the City of Lisbon (Portugal) and the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy. The winner will be announced at the Procura+ Seminar on 12 October in Brussels.

The Portuguese capital is recognised for its development of a Procurement Planning Platform (PPP). The platform serves as a backbone for a strategic sourcing approach towards sustainability and innovation. It does so by setting sustainability targets at the Pre-tendering stage identifying key-procurement areas for sustainability in the Smart Open Lisbon Program an Annual Public Procurement Plan, which it also monitors and provides data for. The PPP follows an internal regulation that defines the mandatory steps concerning the process level, allowing all procurement units to register and categorise their purchasing need.

The Ministry of the Economic Affairs and Climate Policy of the Netherlands challenged the workspace hardware market with its IWR2021 project. The project included in its scope all ICT hardware for the national offices and employees of the central government, applying sustainability and circularity criteria to all tenders in this category. In doing so, the project set a new standard in the field. For example, this was the first time an ICT tender requested CO2 footprints and carried out a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) calculation for all products. Other newly introduced elements included the use of Fairtrade Climate Standard to compensate for all the CO2 emitted by the delivered products, and the use of the TCO Certified Edge E-Waste Compensated for waste compensation.

More about the successful innovation procurements of Lisbon and the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs can be found on the website of the Procura+ Awards.