Challenge

European cities face an urgent need to accelerate their transition towards climate neutrality while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and strengthening Europe’s open strateigc autonomy. However, public demand for innovative climate solutions remains fragmented, limiting the market uptake of breakthrough technologies. Public procurers often lack the mechanisms to jointly stimulate innovation, while companies-particularly SMEs and start-ups-face barriers to accessing public procurement markets. At the same time, strongrer collaboration between the demand and supply sides is needed to ensure that innovative solutions are developed, validated, deployed, and scaled effectively across cities.

Solutions

The project promotes the use of Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) as a strategic tool to drive innovation from the demand side. It supports consortia of public procurers, led by climate-neutral cities, in jointly procuring the research and development of innovative solutions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions in areas such as energy-efficient buildings, renewable energy, sustainable mobility, and digitalisation.

The project encourages continuous dialogue between public authorities, industry, SMEs, start-ups, researchers, citizens, and other end users through open market consultations and stakeholder engagement. Close collaboration with the Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities Mission Platform ensures support for procurement preparation, solution replication, impact monitoring, and knowledge exchange. The project also promotes policy cooperation and the mobilisation of additional national investments to ensure that innovative procurement practices continue beyond the lifetime of the project.

Results

The project is expected to stimulate the development and market uptake of innovative solutions that contribute to climate-neutral cities while strengthening the competitiveness and resilience of the European economy. By leveraging public procurement as a driver of innovation, it creates new business opportunities for European companies and accelerates the commercialisation of breakthrough net-zero technologies.

The project supports the deployment, validation and replication of innovative climate solutions across participating in follower cities, while contributing to standardisation, regulation and certification where appropriate. It also aims to achieve measurable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and 2050 compared with project baselines, strengthen national policy frameworks for innovation procurement and increase the long-term adoption of sustainable solutions throughout Europe.