Please complete the following form to apply for our 2025/26 cohort programme, fully funded by the UK government, to receive personalised innovation procurement support along with peer-to-peer learning.
Open call is closing on the 7th of March 2025.
Rikesh Shah
Head of Innovation Procurement Empowerment Centre
If you have any questions ahead of submitting your application to join the cohort, please send them to contact@ipec.org.uk
"It's a great programme. It will definitely build experience and confidence within your teams, it's a no brainer for local authorities to take it up and you can learn a lot in in what is really a relatively short amount of time."Jacob Pryor, Transport Policy, Bidding and Strategic Project Group Manager, Bristol City Council
We will help you raise you and your colleagues’ confidence and abilities while being by your side throughout one of your live end-to-end procurement processes. So if you have a desire to procure innovation, resources or sponsorship to speed up a culture shift in your council, and have a buying budget to address an innovation challenge – then we would like to hear from you!
We welcome a range of professionals from each council to participate – such as: procurement, legal, finance, service managers, transformation, innovation, data and digital, or research and insights. Including other challenge specific specialists, for example net zero officers. As feedback suggests that a mix is essential to achieve strategic change that lasts. Therefore, we welcome groups of approximately 3-6 people from each council made up of these professions which we will work in partnership with.
We have heard time and again how councils require more than just technical procurement training. There are a range of factors which block innovative solutions that don’t get addressed. So we have included many of these in our package of fully-funded support. Such as: improving stakeholder relations, better SME engagement approaches, ways to overcome organisational and strategic problems, how to discover and shape challenges, attracting innovation, trial support, and risk management techniques. All of which have specifically been designed for Local Authorities looking to procure innovation.
