Learn about the project and discover resources which can help you procure innovation.
Connected Places Catapult’s mission is to help British businesses address the Grand Challenges of today in order to create Connected Places, fit for the future. Places are unique, but the challenges they face are not. Local authorities and their strategic partners face a myriad of local, national and global challenges – from the all too familiar issue of managing rising demand for services in the context of prolonged austerity, up to and including tackling the increasingly pressing climate emergency.
To help local place leaders rise to this challenge, they need to be able to use the full potential of public procurement by working with you to challenge procurement so that we can utilise the full potential of public procurement.
We are working with our partners including the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (Solace), the Public Sector Transformation Academy and the Local Government Chronicle to challenge procurement where we aim to:
- Dismantle the barriers that procurement – and how it is frequently perceived by stakeholders – poses, and to help ensure that brilliant solutions are made more accessible to the market
- Encourage place leaders and their teams to rethink the role of procurement in delivering organisational objectives and to help foster changes in business processes that make that shift possible
- Encourage commissioners and project teams to involve procurement specialists in problem exploration and specification, as a precursor to inviting them to pitch for contracts
- Drive confident investment in procurement teams, ensuring they have the bandwidth, skills and training to use the full array of tools available to them
- Help develop well-signposted gateways that will encourage prospective suppliers with great ideas to come forward and help us all make more places that are fit for the future.
