Did you know that on average, innovation procurement is used well below 1% of all public buying cases in the EU? Public procurement is often seen as a technical, lengthy procedure, with formal and non-intuitive design, abstract requirements and strict eligibility evaluation criteria. As a result, many prospective companies choose not to bid and many public buyers often end up receiving yesterday’s technologies for tomorrow’s public services.
Yet behind every public-sector innovation is a team navigating municipality, ministry or public institution structures to provide the best products and services for their citizens. What they often need is a “learning by doing” support from practitioners of how to ensure quality, transparency and manage risks between public buyers and private bidders.
These observations were the starting point of EIT Urban Mobility-supported project IPROMO (Innovation Procurement Roadmap: Methodology in Overcoming Obstacles), bringing together partners from Latvia and Malta to strengthen innovation procurement capacity and support the adoption of new approaches across the public sector.
IPROMO was led by VEFRESH in partnership with the Riga City Council Digital Agency and Malta’s Project Aegle Foundation between February 2024 and July 2025. The project focused on helping public authorities better understand how innovation procurement can be used in practice, what obstacles prevent its wider application, and what tools are needed to support procurement specialists, municipalities and public institutions.
Through six co-creation workshops, four regional visits, training sessions and dissemination activities, IPROMO engaged more than 254 unique participants representing nine municipalities, four ministries and seven companies. Experts from Latvia, Malta, Finland, Norway, Poland, Croatia and the United Kingdom also contributed to project activities, helping transfer knowledge and experience across borders. Through project outcomes like the innovation procurement roadmap and hands-on innovation procurement training, the project enabled participants to compare different public service provision contexts and understand how innovation procurement methods can be adapted to local administrative, legal and market conditions.
One of the project’s most significant outcomes was its contribution to Latvia’s wider work on strengthening innovation procurement capacity, including the future development of a national Innovation Procurement Competency Center under Latvia’s State Chancellery, linked to the P2I initiative. In Malta, the project created a direct bridge to GovTech4All, where the insights contributed to training local partners on how to design innovation procurement processes. This knowledge was later reflected in the Malta Local Councils AI Pilot, where local councils were invited to participate in a design-contest-based innovation procurement process to source, pilot and scale an AI solution. Together, these examples show how IPROMO helped move innovation procurement from methodology into practical public-sector use cases across different national contexts.
From real-world procurement to practical learning
A key feature of IPROMO was its focus on practical application. The project used the Riga Municipality’s 5G4Lives drone procurement initiative as a live case study, demonstrating how innovation procurement can be applied in practice to address complex urban challenges. This real-world example helped translate methodology into actionable insights for public authorities. Beyond its national impact, IPROMO also contributed to EIT Urban Mobility’s wider objective of helping cities adopt innovative solutions through stronger public sector capabilities. To ensure the project’s results remain accessible beyond its duration, an eleven-episode podcast series featuring procurement specialists from across Europe was also created and circulated.
The project revealed the need for continued capacity building among the public and private sector alike. During regional visits, 78% of participants reported having no prior knowledge of innovation procurement, highlighting the importance of targeted training and practical support for public authorities.
The relevance of IPROMO was also recognised beyond the project itself. In 2025, Riga Municipality received the State Chancellery’s public administration innovation award “Celmlauzis” in the “Practice” category for achievements in innovation procurement through IPROMO.
“Procurement will never be the most headline-grabbing word in urban innovation, but it is where real change either happens or gets stuck. IPROMO helped us work with municipalities, public institutions and innovation partners from Latvia, Malta and across Europe to make innovation procurement more understandable, more practical and less abstract. With the support of EIT Urban Mobility, we were able to show that better public services do not start only with big ideas. They start with better questions, better procedures and the confidence to try something new”, explained a representative from VEFRESH.
Overall, IPROMO demonstrated how structured collaboration and practical tools can help public authorities move from traditional procurement models towards more adaptive and iterative driven approaches in acquiring the best services for their citizens. With the wider European network of innovation procurement competence centres developing further, the next four years we will be able to continue the support of cities and private companies alike.
