How can innovative approaches to procurement help local authorities tackle some of their biggest challenges? Ahead of their upcoming session at Strictly Highways 2026, we spoke to members of the Commercial Innovation Hub team to find out how they are helping public sector organisations access proven solutions, work differently with suppliers and unlock innovation at scale.
Amy Richards, Assistant Innovation Lead and Graeme Jarvie, Commercial Innovation Engagement & Capability Lead at the Department for Business, Innovation, Science & Trade (DBIST), share their insights.
Q. What is the Commercial Innovation Hub?
A. The Commercial Innovation Hub is a team within DBIST whose primary aim is to increase the amount of innovation the public sector can access, and use government procurement as a lever for economic growth.
A key part of its role is working with suppliers that already have innovative solutions that can support public sector delivery, helping organisations scale those solutions and ensuring the right commercial models are in place to support their growth.
While the Hub sits within government, its work is not limited to a single department. It works with colleagues across government and the wider public sector. Through engagement with LCRIG the Hub is now looking to extend that support to more local authorities.
The team can also provide an objective perspective, offering advice and ‘critical friendship’ to organisations considering how they procure innovation and whether there are alternatives to traditional procurement routes.
Q. Can you give us an example of a project the Hub has supported?
A. One recent project involved working closely with colleagues at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI), the UK Government’s AI incubator at No. 10.
The team was asked to identify AI solutions that could help improve the planning process, potentially reducing processes that currently take days or weeks to a matter of minutes, while keeping a human in the loop to ensure decisions and outputs remained appropriate.
The Commercial Innovation Hub worked with the organisations to develop an accelerated procurement process, providing commercial options and supporting the delivery of the procurement.
The project made use of the new Procurement Act to approach the process differently from a traditional procurement exercise. Rather than relying solely on written applications, suppliers were given the opportunity to demonstrate their solutions as part of the evaluation.
Using this approach reduced the typical timescale from launch to preferred supplier from around 48 weeks to just 18 weeks, and enabled the award of an adaptive contract aligned to Agile delivery principles. This allowed the solution and service model to evolve in line with emerging business needs rather than being fixed at the outset. The work has now resulted in a contract with a supplier providing an augmented planning tool designed to speed up the decision-making process.
Q. Why should local authorities care about innovation procurement?
A. For local authorities, innovation procurement can provide an opportunity to get more value from limited resources while gaining access to new technologies and solutions.
Better engagement with the market can help local authorities identify solutions they may not even know exist, particularly when they are tackling challenges where the answer is not immediately obvious.
For local government, the financial context makes this particularly important. Local authorities are under continued pressure to deliver services effectively, often with constrained resources.
Finding new and innovative ways to deliver services or solve problems can therefore have a direct impact on citizens’ lives and communities.
The challenge is not simply about doing ‘more with less’ but finding different ways of working when continuing with the status quo may no longer be sustainable.
Q. What type of highway challenges could innovation procurement help address?
A. The Hub sees particular potential in challenges where the solution is not yet clear, or where existing approaches are no longer delivering the results required.
These are the problems that can sometimes feel like a dead end, where organisations know what they need to achieve but have struggled to find an effective way of getting there.
That is where engaging with the market can be particularly valuable. Rather than starting with a predetermined solution, organisations can give suppliers an opportunity to demonstrate what is already possible and highlight developments that public sector organisations may not yet be aware of.
But innovation procurement is not only about finding something completely new.
There are already innovative solutions available that are not necessarily being adopted at scale. Different authorities may be tackling similar problems but using different approaches or procuring different solutions.
Greater collaboration between authorities could help address this.
By bringing organisations together around shared challenges, local authorities could potentially reduce duplication, build greater purchasing power and take advantage of economies of scale.
Events and networks that bring local authorities together therefore have an important role to play, allowing authorities to share what has worked, what has not, and what innovations are being developed or adopted elsewhere.
Q. Isn’t innovation procurement expensive and risky?
A. Innovation inevitably involves an element of risk. The important question is how that risk is managed.
There can also be a risk in doing nothing. Maintaining the status quo may mean continuing to spend significant amounts of public money on approaches that are not solving the underlying problem.
The Commercial Innovation Hub works with teams to help them consider and manage risk appropriately, recognising that public sector organisations have a particular responsibility when spending public money.
One approach is to create an environment where it is acceptable to test ideas, learn quickly and, where necessary, fail fast.
For example, a relatively small pilot that does not deliver the expected results can still provide valuable information. Understanding why an approach did not work can prevent an organisation from investing significantly more money in the same direction.
The objective is not to eliminate risk altogether, but to manage it intelligently and learn from it.
Q. What are you looking forward to at Strictly Highways?
A. For the team, Strictly Highways provides an opportunity to meet a much wider range of people working in the sector and bring together many of the conversations they have already been having individually.
The team is particularly interested in hearing from organisations that have been working in highway innovation, understanding what solutions already exist, what has prevented wider adoption and where the Commercial Innovation Hub could genuinely add value.
We’ve been surprised by how many solutions are already out there. The challenge now is understanding what has happened to those solutions, why some have not been adopted at scale and where there may be opportunities to support wider uptake.
Avoiding duplication is also important. There are already innovation programmes being delivered across the sector, including work involving the Department for Transport and ADEPT’s Live Labs.
The Hub wants to understand where it can complement existing activity rather than duplicate it.
And, of course, there is another important attraction to the event: the famous Winter Gardens Ballroom and the afternoon tea!
Q. How can people find out more?
A. The Commercial Innovation Hub team will be at Strictly Highways and taking part in a session at 14:45 on 8 October. The team will also be available throughout the two-day event for anyone who wants to find out more or discuss potential challenges.
Following Strictly Highways, we’ll be holding two online workshops: a Public Sector workshop on 13 October and a Private Sector workshop on 20 October. More details to be published soon.
Organisations can also engage with its work through the Public Sector Innovation Alliance. The Alliance uses K-Hub, which people can sign up to access quarterly events and a regular newsletter covering innovation across the public sector, including examples of best practice, lessons learned and emerging opportunities.
Find out more here: https://khub.net/group/public-sector-innovation-alliance or email cih@dsit.gov.uk.
Thank you to Amy and Graeme at the Commercial Innovation Hub for sharing their insights. We look forward to hearing more from them at Strictly Highways.