Podcast
The Future Fix Podcast: Food Security and Circular Economies
Evergreen released the fifth episode of the podcast series, The Future Fix: Solutions for Communities Across Canada. The Future Fix is a colla…
December 5, 2019
Report
May 30, 2017
The Guelph Civic Accelerator: A Public Procurement Experiment
Brookfield Institute
A look at the Guelph Civic Accelerator pilot, a project that is breathing new life into traditional public procurement.
The Civic Accelerator pilot project is an initiative co-developed by the City of Guelph‘s innovation team and the Guelph Lab, which has a mandate to leverage research from the University of Guelph and apply it to real life problems. It is one example of what can happen when a regional government reimagines how they do procurement within the existing regulatory context, in order to provide better services to citizens, on one hand, and to create commercialization opportunities for early stage businesses on the other.
Government procurement is the act of government purchasing goods and services and can be a powerful lever for policymakers. The two main benefits of procurements are enabling governments to select vendors to provide the best goods and services available and positioning government as a critical customer for business.
The pilot project had two core objectives:
- Redesign traditional procurement processes to de-risk complex technology purchases in situations where no clear solution is available on the market.
- Create commercialization opportunities for early-stage businesses in southwestern Ontario.
Download this paper in order to know if and how the project was successful.
“