“Let’s talk the same language and we can change the market”: this was the main takeaway of the first Annual Big Buyers Symposium, held in Brussels on November 9^th.  In this occasion, more than 60 public procurers, technical experts and representatives of public authorities met to celebrate and draw conclusions on their two-year collaboration, encouraged by the European Commission initiative named “Big Buyers for Climate and Environment”.

The objective of this project was to promote collaboration between public buyers across the EU in implementing strategic procurement for sustainable solutions. A bottom-up needs assessment of participants resulted in the creation of four working groups, dealing with Zero-Emissions Construction Sites, Circular Construction, Heavy-Duty Electric Vehicles, and Digital Solutions in the Healthcare Sector.

Overtime, the four groups have joined forces and collectively engaged with 61 companies and multiple business associations to leverage their purchasing power. The project offered many opportunities to engage with market players (mainly innovative SMEs), factory visits, ePitching, closing the gap between public buyers and the innovation ecosystem. To guarantee long-lasting results, the Circular Construction working group elaborated a Joint Declaration of Intent recommending the way forward for broader use of circular construction material, in particular asphalt (already endorsed by 14 signatories). Not only, the Zero-Emission Construction Site group presented a Joint Statement of Demand asking for a green shift in the construction market, signed by five cities.

In other words, this collective effort had concrete and long-lasting results, because it did not only create a network of like-minded stakeholders in public procurement, but it also introduced a new modus operandi in the field of cross-border procurement collaboration. In fact, by working together and pooling their resources, cities, central purchasing bodies, and other major public procurers have discussed good practices and built market intelligence of the latest up-to-date solutions in their field.

In the words of Rosanna Alessandrello (representative of AQuAS, the Agency of Quality Assessment of Healthcare in Catalonia), “the Big Buyers Initiative has been a key project to ensure that public buyers across Europe share their knowledge, best – and bad - practices and their experiences in their field of procurement.” Not only, “sharing common challenges and common pains was particularly useful to build together future public procurements.” Indeed, during the panel discussions, Léon Dijk (City of Rotterdam) straightforwardly explained that “innovation procurement is about what you want, not what you can get”. Consequently, according to Robert Piererfellner (City of Vienna) and Philip Mortensen (City of Oslo), transferring these new needs to the market was easier when done collectively, with a stronger bargaining power.

Notably, this was never an easy task: Josep Maria Guiu Segura (Health and Social Care Constortium of Catalonia) mentioned the difficulty of initially sharing common objectives across Europe despite facing the same problems. Nonetheless, Cristian Benito Manrique (City Council of Barcelona), also highlighted that: “the fact that some buyers had already faced certain obstacles paved the way for the opportunity to share potential solutions with stakeholders that strongly needed them”. And most importantly, according to Ms Alessandrello, “collaboration was carried out in a very humble way: no one was teaching anyone but everyone was there to listen”.

This collective effort was also indirectly beneficial to the group of observers of this initiative. Louise Knight, professor at the University of Twente, told us that she “would be crazy not to attend” to interact with the rest of participants and learn more about their achievements. In fact, this was the first time that public buyers met in presence after two years, an occasion that has allowed them to strengthen their professional relationships and better communicate their ideas.

Therefore, the Commission will encourage and invest even more in the collaboration among public authorities for sustainable procurement in 2023: this initiative will be relaunched and scaled up to include 10 working groups, with enormous potential benefits for the environment and European citizens. Without doubts, the Big Buyers Project has demonstrated the power of green and innovation procurement to drive the market, stimulate innovation, and contribute to broader EU initiatives such as the Green Deal and REPower EU. The next step? A new needs assessment that will identify new areas on which the third edition of the Big Buyers project will focus.