Public procurement plays a crucial strategic role in a country's economy and in delivering quality services to its citizens. However, it is also susceptible to risks of fraud and corruption due to the significant financial flows involved. In 2022, public procurement in Greece represented approximately 12% of the country's GDP and accounted for 23% of total government expenditures. The COVID-19 crisis exacerbated the risk of integrity violations and increased incidents of fraud and corruption, particularly within the realm of public procurement. Greece's ranking on the Corruption Perceptions Index for 2022 was 51st out of 180 countries, indicating a need for improvement. Additionally, a significant majority of respondents (98%) in the 2022 Special Eurobarometer believed that corruption was widespread in Greece, well above the EU average of 68%. The National Strategy for Public Procurement (NSPP) 2021-2025 includes a comprehensive set of actions to promote transparency through specified auditing procedures in public procurement and achieve a high level of professionalization. DG REFORM, through the Technical Support Instrument (TSI), will support the Greek National Transparency Authority (NTA) in achieving strategic priorities of NSPP 2021-2025, namely establishing an integrated risk management framework, strengthening audits and fostering integrity in PP practitioners. The project will be provided by OECD and its key outputs will be:

• A Risk management framework for public procurement and practical tools for its successful implementation;
• A Risk-based methodology for auditing in public procurement supported by training materials and workshops;
• A Code of Conduct/deontology to enhance integrity amongst public procurement practitioners;
• Specialised integrity training and training materials for public procurement practitioners.

Lead Beneficiary: National Transparency Authority (NTA). Contractor: OECD  European Commission: DG REFORM.B2

As sports fields take up a lot of space in cities, they could play an important role in making the city more sustainable. At the moment, current artificial grass pitches adversely affect the climate. Together with market parties we want to bring about a change! We are looking for innovative solutions and developments that are applicable to various situations and to multiple artificial grass pitches. Our goal: sustainable artificial grass pitches made of circular materials, that contribute to an improved water balance, a better approach to heat stress and a general positive contribution to the energy issue. The cities of Amsterdam and Haarlem are working together to apply this project on a large scale eventually. This is why we named the project: Scale up Future-proof sports fields. We are a project supported by EU-funding through the LIFE - programme, or project is registered here. 

Our ambitions:

• Fully circular sports fields,
• Smarter and more efficient construction processes,
• Climate adaptation: sport fields that prevent heat stress and smart use of rain water,
• Sports fields generating energy that is used for the club house and/or the surrounding area,
• Solutions that contribute to multiple ambitions are preferred

PROTECT aims at levering innovation procurement to unlock the climate service (CS) market’s potential to support urgent climate adaptation and mitigation. The project will allow public and private organisations to build up and integrate their knowledge and skills about climate change, environmental observation (EO) and innovation procurement, notably enabling public authorities to shift to a proactive governance model, using innovative public procurement approaches to increase value and climate impact for money. It shall increase access of CS SME providers across Europe to public procurement markets and shape solutions that best address public demand, both specific and systemic. The initial focus will be on five encompassing application domains (Energy & Utilities, Sustainable Urban Communities, Agriculture, Forestry and other Land use, Marine and Coastal Environments and Civil Security and Protection) and their contributions to the areas of sustainability in Horizon Europe’s Cluster 6. The project will source and assess existing and high-potential CS solutions and technologies that use EO data. It will engage with an extensive and varied community of procurers, inform the definition and aggregation of their needs and functional requirements for CS, explaining, fostering, and supporting a ‘buying with impact’ approach. Clearer, less fragmented demand shall guide and support R&D for future CS. PROTECT will prepare the operational ground for one or more joint, cross border or coordinated pre-commercial procurement (PCP) processes and identify short-term actions so that Public Procurement of Innovative Solutions (PPI) can be activated towards or right after the project’s end. At the policy level, it will provide decision-makers for procurement, climate, and policy, at EU, national, regional and local levels, with practical recommendations and guidelines to boost the use of innovation procurement for climate action.

Health InnoFacilitator aims to create a community leveraging capabilities and promoting innovation procurement in healthcare services.

The project will demonstrate relevance and effectiveness of cooperation between various stakeholders, supporting innovation actors (start-ups and SMEs) in healthcare to access public procurement, and supporting the public and private buyers (hospitals, regional and local authorities, public and private purchasing centers) to launch Public Procurement of Innovation (PPI).

Transforming the public procurement culture of multiple EU public buyers into one that systematically encourages added value for citizens and market innovation and advances towards Public Procurement of Innovation (PPI) is one of our strategic goals.

This can be achieved by applying a value-based approach, ensuring that the most economic solutions are selected and invested in striving for the good health of all EU citizens.

The objective of the Sustainability and Procurement in International, European, and National Systems (SAPIENS) is to foster interdisciplinary research into the evolving use of public procurement to address the social and environmental challenges of the 21st century with a view to create a significantly increased European knowledge base and research capacity on the law, the economics and the business sciences of SPP, thus helping Europe in addressing social and environmental challenges. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 956696

a Europe-wide Joint Action (2020-2023) that seeks to contribute to an improved quality of food supplied to citizens of Europe by facilitating the exchange and testing of good practices concerning:

• the monitoring and analysis of how the food that people consume changes at the European and national level
• the regulations on the marketing of food and beverages to children and
• the procurement of food by public bodies for educational institutions, social care facilities, etc.

Emergency Medical Services (EMS) in Europe are characterised by a heterogeneous landscape with diverse organisational setups, technology standards, coordination mechanisms and actors. This is the result of different historical and institutional contexts. However, these EMS are united by the common aim of providing timely care to casualties of sudden and life-threatening emergencies or disasters in cross-border settings and international humanitarian missions. Fostering the response capacities and increasing the cooperation of the Emergency Medical Services Systems (EMSS) is of decisive importance for strengthening the resilience of European societies.

During the prior iProcureSecurity (CSA) project, a large number of EMS were involved to identify, evaluate and prioritise future challenges and needs. The creation of an interoperable, flexible triage management system supported by modern technologies was among the most requested solutions in the context of security-related scenarios.

This iProcureSecurity PCP action is a result of those intense participatory processes. The action will lead to an innovative triage management system that supports the EMS on the field in the management of the Mass Casualty Incidents (MCIs). The envisaged solution will be extremely flexible and interoperable, in order to adapt to the different procurers’ needs.

Overall, the iProcureSecurity PCP Solution aims to: (a) Fully digitalise the triage management operations on the field, and provide guidance and support to the EMS practitioners; (b) Facilitate the communication and the information sharing among EMS on the field and external stakeholders. (c) Facilitate the decision-making process of the actors involved, by proving them with key information in real time, as well as with alerting and notification systems.

Following the EC Guidelines on Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP), through a competitive series of design, prototype and pilot steps, the iProcureSecurity PCP will contract suppliers to deliver the creation and deployment of the envisaged triage management system.

In CircularPSP leading circular cities are to procure innovative solutions to overcome organisational, informational and operational barriers of municipalities to transition towards a Circular Economy. The project will contribute to this public buyers community on three levels:

• Experience into organisation and implementation of joint innovation procurement 
• Access to solutions helping cities to avoid procurement where possible and prepare circular procurements
• Application of the Procurement Clauses of AI (light version) developed by the community 

PPI4cities intends to support the cities in BSR region to improve their public services and achieve their ambitious innovation goals through developing pragmatic tools, which would facilitate the uptake of public procurement of innovation. There are so many innovations that can be implemented to make urban life easier. Therefore, project intends to support cities throughout the process to deal with different economic, environmental and social challenges and look for the smart solutions to them. It will do so by bringing together a portfolio of capacity building material and tools that enable the various actors of the cities to exploit structured content and move forward faster and with greater confidence and certainty in adopting smart cities' solutions through PPI. It will also act as a network of BSR cities, for cities, dedicated to public procurement of innovation.