Innovative Procurement Challenge with PA Consulting

About this Challenge

Who, What, Why?

If you’re an innovator, entrepreneur, team, start-up or established company from Belfast, we are offering you the opportunity to develop and showcase your smart ideas to create a smarter, healthier, happier Belfast city centre, creating a vibrant and healthy city centre that promotes quality of life and wellbeing.

Over the past few months, Connected Places Catapult and PA Consulting have been implementing the UK-South Korea Innovation Twins project and engaging with Belfast and Sejong in South Korea to help them work with their innovation ecosystem and shape the innovations of tomorrow. We will be showcasing the work we have been doing at the end of March 2022 to City Leaders, Public Sector Ministers and our Sejong partners at a Demo Day.  

To support the project and Demo Day, we are offering you an opportunity to participate in a “start-up” package to build on your ideas to create a smarter, healthier, happier Belfast city and provide you with the skills, experience, and engagement with potential stakeholders to obtain funds/sponsorship to further develop your ideas. In addition, the engagement of South Korea in this project will provide the unique opportunity to build relationships and visibility with key stakeholders in South Korea.

The opportunity will take the form of:

• Providing funding to develop a prototype or mature solution to support the city centre vision
• Providing business training to you to enhance your ability to market your product and be successful in gaining additional funds to support additional development
• Providing an opportunity to showcase your prototype/ideas/solution and provide feedback on the process and business training programme at a demo day event at the end of March.
• The opportunity to work directly with your Challenge Owners. They will be able to help solidify, question and develop your solution and product inside and outside of training.

The Challenge

As city centres come back to life following the pandemic, there is an ambition for City Centres to become vibrant and healthy places that promotes quality of life and wellbeing. We would like to hear how you could use digital technology to bring that idea to life, i.e. through digital apps and services. Ideas may be how to:

• Make active travel such as walking and cycling a more attractive option to travel to and across the city centre?
• Encourage people to eat healthier and more sustainable food
• Empower community groups to use the city centre for recreation, culture and leisure
• Create new forms of collective entertainment such as immersive storytelling that enhances our unique built heritage
• Help us better understand the quality of the urban environment to maximise placemaking opportunities and help overcome barriers
• Promote quality of life by improving air quality and reducing carbon footprint in the city?
• Or you may have other ideas of your own based on the theme of promoting quality of life and wellbeing in City Centres. 

We will require participants to develop a prototype/showcase a solution to demonstrate how their ideas can meet the challenge. 

Open Call Requirements

• Fill out the application form.
• Be a Belfast and Belfast Region founded or based Start-Up and/or SME.
• Present a solution that is clear, well thought out and seeks to solve the challenge at hand.
• Has the potential to be a product/service that can be scaled and implemented within Belfast Innovation District.

Key Dates

• Open Call challenge launch: 14th January
• Briefing and Q&A session: 21st January
• Deadline for applications: 31st January
• Applicants notified: 7th February

The open call documents, including application form can be download here.

Please send your response to: Chloe.Harrison-steward@paconsulting.com

Watch the Briefing and Q&A session