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United States : CITYMART to change the way municipalities handle procurement
Publish Date : 03-Sep-2015
New York-based Citymart wants to change the way municipalities handle procurement. The company has proved its concept in the Eurozone, and recently moved to the US with a few significant partner cities including New York City, and Long Beach, California.
The founders say that while conducting their first 100 challenges, they learned a lot about how big the problems are in municipal procurement.
Citymart CEO Sascha Haselmayer said, "We started out CItymart with the idea that you could create a catalog of solutions and if you put them all in one place, cities would just pick the best ones. But one thing we found is that cities need a lot more help than we expected. So we are working with them to prioritize the problems."
This is how it works: Cities partner with Citymart which offers a platform and knowledgebase for cities to open up procurement to small enterprises and civic startups. Through Citymart, municipalities learn how to prioritize and communicate problems into a challenge question hosted on the Citymart platform. Startups, businesses and other stakeholders can submit solutions to that problem and the city will select the best option. The platform is designed for orienting procurement away from single task orders, or pure purchase agreements, and toward solving actual problems.
Haselmayer added, "One of the big things for cities has been for them to see that the best challenges also have a clear communications strategy that launches with them. When you start a procurement you also start a public debate about city services so government has to do the outreach required with that."
