Long Beach brings innovation to procurement

Procurement is not an area that typically springs to mind when talking about innovation, but it’s a key focus for the City of Long Beach, CA.

In an interview at the recent Cities Today Institute City Leadership Forum in Las Vegas, Lea Eriksen, Long Beach’s Director of Technology and Innovation and Chief Information Officer, said: “The reason we are innovating with procurement is because traditional RFPs [Requests for Proposals] and procurement policies can often be long drawn-out processes where governments have to know exactly what they’re looking for with very detailed specifications. It anticipates that we know exactly what we need.

“With our innovative procurement pilot projects, we are able to move quicker and have more innovative approaches to piloting projects that use emerging technology here in Long Beach.”

[Watch the full interview here]

Giving staff, vendors and residents a say

The city is taking a multi-pronged approach.

Its Smart City Challenge focuses on staff-driven procurement where team members from departments identify challenges that they’re trying to solve. The innovation team works with them to develop challenge statements and invite the private sector to respond. This year’s challenges came from departments including parks and recreation, water, and public works.

Another programme, Pitch Long Beach, is vendor-driven. Rather than waiting for an RFP, vendors can fill out a form at any time, explaining how their innovative solution will meet a city challenge.

“I get tons of emails and LinkedIn messages and I don’t have any time to respond to them so I think this is a really helpful thing to steer any communications to that programme,” says Eriksen.

The latest initiative, LB Co-Lab, brings in residents who will develop challenge statements and work together to prototype and test civic technology solutions in a neighbourhood.

The new procurement models are working and several pilots have gone on to become long-term deployments, according to Eriksen.

She says it’s key to work closely with the procurement office and finance teams to make these initiatives succeed.

It’s also important to be open-minded about solutions: “We don’t know what we don’t know.”