5 tips from Växjö when procuring innovation partnerships
In Växjö, the municipality procures for innovation. The purpose is to find new ways of collaborating between the municipality and vendors in order to increase digitalization pace and find new innovations based on societal problems. Växjö Municipality has so far issued three contracts for innovation partnership and is continuously working on new projects. In this article, Magnus Bringhed a project head of procurement shares his top five recommendations on successful results when working with procurement of innovation.
Växjö recommends: Five things to consider when procuring partnerships for innovation
1. Time Management: Give yourself plenty of time.
Applying Innovation Procurement Partnership is one of the possibilities Public Procurement gives us, and there is no short cut to it but rather the opposite. It requires handful of time and continuous dialogue with bidding suppliers during the negotiation phase in order to reach solutions in a partnership.
2. Focus on necessary requirements and the effects, rather than demands
In traditional procurement focus is placed on “SHALL” and “SHOULD” requirements, whereas in Innovation Procurement we encourage the opposite by minimizing such requirements that can narrow the innovations raising point. Instead, we lay more focus on formulating the organization’s requisites and the outcome we expect the new solutions to contribute to.
3. An agreement on requirements for placing orders and maintenance shall be settled as early as possible when you enter a partnership
What differs procurement of innovation partnership from traditional procurement is that the agreement includes both parties in an early stage where both parties contribute to developing solutions as well as enjoying them. Even though the agreement is settled at an early stage before its development, one must not forget to follow the contracted terms after the developed solutions are at place.
4. A good dialogue between parties is vital during the entire partnership
As this is a partnership, dialogue is central both during the procurement process as well as during the development phase. It is important that both parties’ perspectives are taken into consideration. Many meetings are required to create an understanding of the needs and its process. As new inventions will affect how the organization’s employees will work in practice, the end-users should be included in the dialogue to give their perspective already at an early stage.
5. Limit yourself throughout the main mission’s path, collect all the good ideas that emerge and pass them to your upcoming projects
With a lot of dialogue, it is easy to come up with new requisites, new solutions and bigger plans than the original. It is therefore necessary to delimit along the way and park these newly developed ideas, and sidetracks for the future.
Picture shows; Head of Procurement in the Diaccess project, Magnus Bringhed.
Picture taken by: Erika Bernstone
You are welcome to contact us in the Diaccess project if you want to hear more about our experiences of innovation procurement.
The article is written by Erika Bernstone (Communications manager Diaccess) erika.bernstone@foretagsfabriken.se
Project manager for the Diaccess project is Andréa Swedenborg andrea.swedenborg@vaxjo.se
Responsible for procurement is Magnus Bringhed magnus.bringhed@vaxjo.se
Related material: https://www.uia-initiative.eu/en/news/vaxjo-procurement-innovation
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