Sagunto secures €134,200 grant to boost innovative public procurement
Sagunto City Council has received a €134,200 grant from IVACE+i, the regional innovation agency, to run the 'Sagunto Horizonte CPI' project from 2026 to 2028, seeking innovative solutions to the city's challenges through public contracts.
Sagunto City Council will spend the next three years building innovation into its everyday municipal management, after the Valencian regional government awarded it a €134,200 grant. The funding comes from IVACE+i Innovación (the Valencian Institute of Business Competitiveness, the region's main innovation agency), formerly known as the Valencian Innovation Agency (AVI), and will fully finance the project Sagunto Horizonte CPI – Challenges, Innovation and Solutions to Transform the City.
The money will be paid out over three years: €32,900 in 2026, €32,300 in 2027 and €69,000 in 2028, matching the programme's timeline, which runs until the end of that final year. Importantly for the council's budget, the grant covers the entire cost of the programme, so the city will not need to spend its own funds to run it.
The scheme relies on a tool called Compra Pública Innovadora (Innovative Public Procurement, or CPI), which has become increasingly common among Spanish public bodies in recent years as a way of driving innovation from two directions. On one hand, it lets a council or other public body ask specifically for products or services that do not yet exist on the market in the exact form it needs; on the other, it pushes companies — especially smaller or technology-based ones — to develop and offer new solutions when bidding for public contracts, rather than simply repeating familiar formulas. In practice, this can mean municipal tenders designed to test technologies or services that are still being developed, before they reach the wider market.
Toni Iborra, the local councillor for Science, Innovation and University Affairs, described the grant as another step in boosting innovation across the area and said it strengthens cooperation between the public and private sectors, opening up new spaces for joint work. He explained that the goal is for universities, research centres, companies and the council itself to work together on solutions to the challenges facing a town that has changed rapidly in recent years, from the transformation of part of its industrial base to the arrival of new technology projects.
The announcement does not specify exactly which projects will be put out to tender with this money, but the timeframe — running to 2028 — and the nature of the programme suggest the council will first identify the urban challenges it wants to tackle this way (mobility, waste management, energy efficiency and digital services are common areas in similar programmes in other towns) before opening procurement processes built around finding innovative solutions. For companies in Sagunto and the wider Camp de Morvedre area, especially those working in technology and innovation, this could open up an additional route into council contracts, with a different profile from traditional tenders.
This push for innovation in procurement comes at a time when Sagunto is going through one of its biggest economic transformations in decades, driven by the arrival of the PowerCo battery gigafactory (a Volkswagen Group subsidiary) and by the consolidation of industrial projects such as those of ArcelorMittal (the town's steel mill) and Saggas (the local gas regasification plant). In that context, having a dedicated innovative-procurement programme could allow the council itself to act as an early customer for start-ups and emerging companies wanting to test their solutions before reaching a wider market — in line with the stated goal of turning innovation into a tool for transforming the city.
IVACE, the body granting the funding, is not new. It was created on 10 May 1984 as a public body of the Valencian regional government, originally under the name IMPIVA, and has since expanded its role as the region's main tool for supporting business competitiveness — eventually taking over the innovation-promotion duties previously handled by AVI. The fact that this particular agency is funding Sagunto's project confirms that the regional government continues to see the town as a place to test public-private innovation partnerships.
According to the City Council, the project forms part of wider efforts to strengthen the Valencian Innovation System, which aims to improve the region's productive model. For Sagunto, which has strengthened its profile in recent years as a magnet for industrial and technology investment, having dedicated funding to modernise its public procurement processes could make it easier for future innovation projects — both municipal ones and those from companies based in the area — to find a more agile framework to develop. According to aytosagunto.es, with additional information from Wikipedia.