Projects

Circular Minds seeks to drive change by embedding circular economy principles into regional governance and public procurement. By scaling up circular practices, the project aims to reduce resource consumption, minimise waste, and promote sustainable material use, contributing to better resource management and environmental health.

Through capacity building, it will equip public authorities, and stakeholders with tools and knowledge to implement circular procurement. This is expected to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and create new opportunities for innovation. By encouraging collaboration and the exchange of Good Practices, the project enables both advanced and emerging regions to adopt tailored circular solutions.

Above all, Circular Minds fosters a shift in mindset, encouraging organisations to recognise the broader impact of circular practices.

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

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

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.

The project aims to facilitate the identification of public innovation needs, conduct market consultations to identify market capabilities and potential solutions, and help public buyers tap into the innovative capacity of SMEs. The project will enhance the capacity of Public Authorities to engage in cross-border PPI for circular solutions and establish a focal point for engagement between Europe’s leading innovation ecosystems and ambitious public authorities interested in leveraging cross- border PPI to accelerate the circular economy.

P5 Innobroker stands for “Public Private Partnership for Public Procurement" of Innovation within the Innobroker Model. It expresses the goal to further develop, accelerate, deploy, validate and demonstrate a self-sustainable EU-wide B2G Public Procurement of Innovation (PPI) brokerage service ecosystem-based business model and platform (Innobroker) for mobilizing and bringing together early adopter public buyers and leading-edge EU SMEs and start-ups as well as to pave the way for the implementation of an effective, collaborative/coordinated set of transnational SMEs/start-up-oriented PPI bids through a Public-Private Partnership PPI Facilitator Business Model (P5 Innovation Procurement broker).