Procurement Educational Consortium for Innovation-Sourcing Using Sustainability (PRECIUS)

Project PRECIUS aims to contribute to the European Green Deal objectives by connecting public procurement leaders, environmental engineers, and Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Project PRECIUS focuses on facilitating, stimulating and interaction between these three communities through their roles:

• Public procurement officers responsible for buying innovations from the market,
• Environmental engineers as a generator of sustainable innovations,
• Entrepreneurs and sales personnel of private firms, i.e. suppliers, mainly SMEs who participate in tenders and sell sustainable solutions to public authorities.

PRECIUS assumes that effective projects for innovation procurement rely on experts in each of the three communities having sufficient competences and knowledge in the other two, plus understanding of leadership of change. Finally, PRECIUS offers a modular online course with elements that learners select according to their needs. The core modules focus on leadership, co-creation, and change management regarding organizational resistance.

The project team PRECIUS consist of four universities, united in an association of universities (i.e., ECIU) and their joint online platform (“ECIU University”). The four universities/project partners are Kaunas University of Technology, University of Aveiro, Tampere University, and the University of Twente.

The project is led by the University of Twente. At the Tampere University, the responsible person is associate professor Aki Jääskeläinen from the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management.

More information about the project is available on the project website: PRECIUS - Procurement Educational Consortium for Innovation-sourcing using Sustainability (utwente.nl)

Project “Procurement Educational Consortium for Innovation-sourcing Using Sustainability (PRECIUS)” runs from 31-05-2022 until 30-05-2025 under the Erasmus+ programme, project number: 2021-2-NL01-KA220-HED-000049179.