Sagunto receives €134,200 from IVACE+i for municipal innovation
Sagunto City Council has secured a €134,200 grant from IVACE+i to fund a fully-financed innovation project running until 2028, with no cost to the local budget.
The local administration has a new source of funding to change the way it tackles the city's challenges. IVACE+i Innovación has awarded Sagunto City Council a €134,200 grant designed to roll out the model known as Innovative Public Procurement (Compra Pública Innovadora, CPI) in the municipality. That funding will launch "Sagunto Horizonte CPI: Retos, Innovación y Soluciones para Transformar la Ciudad" ("Sagunto Innovation Horizon: Challenges, Innovation and Solutions to Transform the City"), a project running until 2028.
Behind the name IVACE+i is the innovation branch of IVACE (Institut Valencià de Competitivitat Empresarial), an agency under the Conselleria d'Indústria, Turisme, Innovació i Comerç (the Valencian government's Industry, Tourism, Innovation and Trade department), which manages much of the region's funding aimed at boosting innovation in both businesses and public administrations.
One feature sets this grant apart: because it covers the entire projected cost, the Council will not need to put in a single euro of its own to develop the initiative. The money will arrive in three stages — €32,900 in 2026, €32,300 in 2027 and the remaining €69,000 in 2028 — until the full amount awarded is reached.
For a council the size of Sagunto's, having a grant that covers the full cost removes a common risk in this type of call for applications: many town councils must co-finance part of the project with their own funds, and some choose not to apply at all because their budgets don't stretch that far.
So what exactly changes with Innovative Public Procurement? Unlike the usual model, where the administration buys products or contracts services already on the market, this approach reverses the process: first a challenge or unmet need is defined, and then companies and research centres are invited to design tailor-made solutions. Each tender stops being a simple purchase and becomes instead a spur for research and the development of products designed specifically for the needs identified. For small and medium-sized businesses in the Camp de Morvedre area, this kind of scheme could mean the chance to compete for projects tied directly to the Council's real needs, rather than relying solely on more conventional public contracts.
This procurement model is not something unique to Sagunto City Council: Innovative Public Procurement is part of a wider, EU-rooted strategy that encourages public administrations to use their contracts as a lever to stimulate research, rather than simply buying products already available on the market. The Valencian regional government (Generalitat Valenciana) has been adding this option to its funding lines in recent years alongside other research and innovation support tools, with the idea that councils of different sizes can identify their own challenges and then, through a competitive process, find technology partners able to design tailor-made solutions.
For Sagunto, the plan involves three stages: identifying the main urban challenges, analysing which solutions are workable, and finally preparing those proposals so they can be built into future tenders. The Councillor for Science, Innovation and University Affairs, Toni Iborra, described the grant as a further boost to the city's push for innovation, stressing that the aim is to build a lasting relationship between the public and private sectors, rather than one-off deals.
The major transformation the councillor refers to is most visible in the arrival of the PowerCo battery gigafactory — a subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group — in the municipality, a project that has turned Sagunto into a reference point for electromobility in the Valencian Community. That shift in the local economy also pushes the council to modernise its own procurement processes, so that the arrival of new industry translates not only into direct jobs but also into technology-partnership opportunities for businesses already established in the Camp de Morvedre district.
According to Iborra, the ultimate goal is to create a shared working space bringing together academic knowledge, research, businesses and the administration itself, to tackle the challenges facing a municipality going through major change — a reference to the economic transformation under way locally. The initiative forms part of the wider push to strengthen the Valencian Innovation System, specifically the regional Impulso a la Compra Pública Innovadora (Boost to Innovative Public Procurement) programme, with the idea that public contracting should stop being seen purely as an administrative formality and start working as a lever for local economic development too. According to El Periódico de Aquí — Sagunto/Camp de Morvedre, with additional data from IVACE.