The BuyZET project will develop innovative procurement plans to help the participating cities achieve their goals of zero emission urban delivery of goods and services. The core cities in the project - Rotterdam, Oslo and Copenhagen - will first identify which goods and service procurement areas have the highest "transportation footprint" - i.e. the number of motorised vehicle trips to transport goods and people generated in delivering the goods or services, and the related emissions. Based on this each city will select two procurement areas to focus on for the project. For each priority area, the cities will then: a) Instigate in-depth market consultation activities with all relevant supply chain actors to identify potential procurement pathways to achieving zero emission delivery. b) Identify and engage with other significant public and private buyers in the priority area with the aim of establishing a buyers group, launching joint or collaborative procurement actions Based on these activities, each city will prepare procurement plans, identifying specific upcoming tenders where the innovative solutions identified will be applied. The core group of cities will be joined by a group of Observer Cities, who will closely engage with project activities and be encouraged to also carry out the defined activities within or following the project period.

The RUGGEDISED project will create urban spaces powered by secure, affordable and clean energy, smart electro-mobility, smart tools and services. The overall aims are: 1. Improving the quality of life of the citizens, by offering the citizens a clean, safe, attractive, inclusive and affordable living environment. 2. Reducing the environmental impacts of activities, by achieving a significant reduction of CO2 emissions, a major increase in the investment and usage of RES and an increase in the deployment of electric vehicles. 3. Creating a stimulating environment for sustainable economic development, by generating more sustainable jobs, stimulating community involvement in smart solutions and to boost start-up and existing companies to exploit the opportunities of the green digital economy and Internet of Things. To achieve the aims, a key innovation challenge in all three lighthouse cities of RUGGEDISED is to arrange successful combinations of integrated smart solutions for energy and e-mobility (enabled by ICT platforms and open data protocols) and business models with the right incentives for stakeholders to invest and participate in a smart society. Specific challenges relevant for the lighthouse cities are: - to manage peak load variation in thermal and electrical energy supply and demand; - to develop appropriate cooperation structures and business models for exchange of energy; - to develop Smart City (open) data platforms and energy management systems RUGGEDISED has derived 10 specific objectives and planned 32 smart solutions to meet the challenges. The development of solutions in the lighthouse cities is not the primary goal of the project, but a necessary means to find the right incentives and to create validated business cases to enable large scale deployment and replication of solutions. Three follower cities Brno, Parma and Gdansk have selected 27 smart follower solutions to follow the lighthouse cities and to prepare for implementation in the future

The Building Capacities in Innovation Procurement for Cities (BUILD) project will roll out a number of training and capacity building actions targeted at upskilling the public procurers on the topic of innovation procurement. Public procurement is a powerful instrument to drive faster adoption of innovation among public sector users while simultaneously promoting economic growth by providing innovative companies opportunity for first user references. The strategic use of procurement to boost demand for innovative goods of services has become an important part of the innovation policy agenda in many EU countries, and is at the core of the new EU public procurement directive (2014/24/EU), which underlines importance of opening opportunities for public procurement of innovation (e.g. by introducing a new innovation partnership procedure). BUILD integrates the highest-quality capacity-building tools to facilitate the roll-out of capacity building and training services to cities. BUILD will engage and train public – private procurers, SMEs and startups via both onsite and online avenues on a number of topics like; 1) Guiding Principles (Valonia) 2) Legal Knowledge and Procedures (Rotterdam) 3) Preliminary market consultation (CE) 4) Pre-commercial procurement (Turku) 5) Competitive dialogue (Turku) 6) Competitive procedure with negotiation (Tartu) 7) Innovation partnership (Valonia) 8) Legal questions and considerations (Rotterdam) and 9) Risk assessment (Valonia). Lastly, BUILD will link and establish synergies with research and innovation projects funded by the EU (via Horizon Europe or other EU funding programmes), with specific focus on EU funded projects fostering PPI, with the aim of facilitating mutual learning and knowledge exchange and will also set up a pro-active dissemination action which will facilitate outreach to key target audiences, namely; public and private buyers, public-owned enterprises, SMEs and start-ups, research institutions among others.