City Halls: Here are the two actions to put your small business first in procurement
Mayors and city leaders should make public procurement truly attractive to small business, beginning with accessibility and innovation. Both categories feed off one another since innovation outcomes thrive on increased competition of ideas, which in turn are facilitated through making it easy for new actors to take part. Further, we found that procurements open to innovation attract diverse small business.
We found no evidence that improvement requires fancy e-procurement systems — our highest ranked cities on both accessibility and innovation use a variety of in-house and contracted platforms. In fact, cities achieved both excellent and poor results with almost any procurement platform on the market. Atlanta leaped from 27th to 1st place in less than 9 months by offering a direct link to its bids on the city home page and migrating to a more accessible platform.
Cities should focus on two action areas that reap high dividends at low- to moderate effort.
1/ Improve Accessibility, make it easy for small business to find bids.
2/ Open up to Innovation, creating opportunities that allow small business to shine.
Action 1: Improve Accessibility
Have you ever put yourself into the shoes of a small business in your city and followed their journey to discover a bid? Cities perform better who have made that journey simple and removed even the simplest barriers.
What Works
- Increase participation of small business by making it easy to find your procurement opportunities. Check out atlantaga.gov for an excellent home page integration.
- Don’t undermine your progress! Pittsburgh led nationally on accessibility until the city deployed a new procurement portal that relegated them to 25th place overnight because it is now so hard to get to the actual RFP documentation.
- Remove any paywalls that force vendors to pay for access to opportunities or bid for RFPs, especially when you are not incurring costs by providing physical material!
- Deploy procurement and listing platforms that require no registration, have no exclusionary practices and will not confuse vendors trying to upsell premium services.
- Build a business case for marketing and communications of procurement opportunities to attract innovative and diverse businesses to consider business with your city.
Action 2: Open up to Innovation
Innovation helps improve your city, but it is also great to drive opportunities for small businesses. Check how you compare today, then improve.
What Works
- Set goals for the number of procurement transactions in 2019–20 and 2029 that we would classify as open to innovation or small business, if you want your city to be innovative and open to start-ups
- Create a business case for innovation in your procurement efforts and prioritize the actions that are going to get you the desired outcomes. We recently built a strong case for a 0.5% investment in procurement resources of a major urban regeneration project to drive more than 10% in cost savings, elevated quality outcomes and improved vendor diversity and civic engagement.
- Build a culture and shared understanding around innovation not just as the risky pursuit of new technologies, but an opening to new or different ways of doing things that can help small business flourish in your city. Read here what startups want you to do!
- Develop a holistic procurement strategy laying out your path to going from back-office function to driving change, participation and accountability through this critical government function.
