Every procurement is an opportunity! We founded Citymart in 2010 to raise the world’s expectations on city procurement. Our mission was to help city leaders treat very procurement as an opportunity: to innovate, to save money, win contracts and improve life for city workers and residents. We helped cities and businesses unlock these opportunities through high-quality methodologies, information and advice, wherever they were in the procurement process.

Citymart BidSpark was an innovative market engagement technology and methodology to deliver transformative results. In essence, it matched procurement against a global database of hundreds of thousands of vendors using natural language processing, to trigger curated notification workflows to help potential vendors easily opt in and out of opportunities. Here are some results, in numbers. — Nashville

The Problem Urban environments continue to be transformed by economic growth and technological advancement. The advent of online retail has led to a massive increase in deliveries in cities all over the world. In city centers, this positive development has also had negative consequences. The uptick in delivery activity has led to…

The Problem As urban centers around the world increase in population and density, the waste produced in each city has also increased. Cities regularly encounter challenges related to their ability to scale waste collection, recycling and composting. Increased interest in sustainability has led cities to wonder how waste can be effectively diverted…

The Problem The issues facing disadvantaged communities in a modern city are complex. Poverty, health, education, employment and crime are interrelated, but in many municipalities, responsibility for programs that address these issues is spread across multiple public and private stakeholders. The atomization of public services has led cities like Dallas, Texas to…

10 years ago we published a handbook on technology-enabled service innovation in cities and a frustration shared across the field that meaningful things just weren’t taking off. Here is what happened to some of our key ideas. Why, have highly valued services like mobile parking, tourism, or solutions for…

This post was first published on Citymart in March 2018 by Shaun Abrahamson, Managing Partner for Urban Us. Lots of government officials want to work with startups. Lots of startup founders want to work with local governments. But very few venture capitalists want to fund startups to work with local…

We know almost nothing about how our city halls spend trillions of dollars every year on the services that shape our lives — like our health, education, environment, transport and culture. What we do know is that things aren’t all great — critical problems like homelessness, air quality and inequities…