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This study aims to examine the influence of market logics on tendering capabilities and small and medium enterprise (SME) involvement in public procurement, the influence of SME governance mechanisms on tendering capabilities and SME involvement in public procurement and the influence of tendering capabilities on SME involvement in public procurement.

Data was collected from owners/managers of SMEs registered by the Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets Authority. The SPSS software and CB-SEM software were used to obtain results on the influence of market logics on tendering capabilities and SME involvement in public procurement, the influence of SME governance mechanisms on tendering capabilities and SME involvement in public procurement and the influence of tendering capabilities on SME involvement in public procurement.

Findings indicated that SME involvement in public procurement is mainly influenced by their governance mechanisms whilst both market logics and governance mechanisms had a positive influence on tendering capabilities of SME firms. Market logics and tendering capabilities had no effect on SME involvement.

The study mainly focussed on SMEs’ involvement in public procurement. The research has implications for decision makers in government and SME firms concerned with enhancing levels of SME involvement in public procurement activities.

Many governments are now focussing on procurement lot sizing so as to increase SME involvement in public procurement. Despite the use of lot sizing, SME involvement in public procurement is still low in many developing countries and also declining in others. Aspects such as market logics and governance mechanisms that may help understand the variations in involvement have not been given significant attention.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between firm size, resources, capabilities and involvement in public procurement. While the liability of smallness has been a recurring theme in research into public sector suppliers, there remains a dearth of evidence and theorising on the effects of size.

A model linking firm size, resources, capabilities, tendering activity and performance is devised. Resource-based view theory informs the model. Survey data from over 3,000 firms active in the Irish public sector marketplace is used to test the model.

As hypothesised, firm size is positively associated with tendering resources and capabilities. Resources and capabilities, in turn, influence tendering activity and performance. Specifically, resources act as enablers for the number and value of contracts firms tender for while capabilities are important for winning contracts. The author also finds similarities between medium and large enterprises in their ability to tender.

The treatment of tendering resources and capabilities is not exhaustive. Future research could include additional indicators of resources (e.g. external consultants, IT) and capabilities (e.g. production, process innovation).

Managers of micro and small suppliers should focus on augmenting their tendering capabilities as they lag bigger suppliers. Legislators need to re-assess current “one-size-fits-all” small and medium enterprise (SME) friendly policy as it is not sensitive to intra-SME differences.

This study introduces an important qualification into understanding of public sector suppliers by demonstrating that SME disadvantage is less black and white than shades of grey.

This chapter focuses on policy intervention that has grown in popularity in the UK since the financial crisis of 2008. The focus is on inclusive growth and more specifically, community wealth building. The concept has been picked up by institutions and think tanks at multiple scales from the OECD to local government. We aim to address the tensions in community wealth building and in particular how local authorities in the UK are adjusting their procurements strategies to increase the tendering capabilities of SMEs in their political geography.

We introduce a UK-based study utilising an ESRC-funded case study, desktop research and semi-structured interviews to investigate how well the region of Greater Manchester (GM) ecosystem was equipped to prepare small firms to learn how to compete for public contracts with evidence applicable to other large-scale tenders.

Overall, at the time of writing business support across GM does not create the value proposition of enabling small firms to be capable at tendering and thus undermines community wealth building (CWB) efforts. The advice on offer is sparse; it offers partial or no advice about different capabilities and is often limited to simple guidance stating procurement rules and compliance demands. Information is often abstract and technical support is also fragmented, making it unlikely that small firms will find resources. Advice fails to engage with evidence on how small firms learn and to provide a learning process. In particular, support to raise absorptive capacity and strategic commitment to tendering, build basic tender readiness and develop and refresh tendering capability is not evident. Training, coaching and peer learning are largely absent.

UK appears to be an experimental ground for CWB with dedicated think tanks and several examples such as the ‘Preston Model’. GM is a suitably sized and comparable region to offer transferable knowledge and indicators to support regions to innovate. We offer a ‘Dashboard of Priorities’ to enhance business support to SMEs so they can win at tendering, thus strengthening CWB policy and impact. Furthermore, we are adding clarity to a fuzzy definition of CWB and define inclusive procurement. We assist global policymakers to answer the fundamental question; are we doing all that we can with these significant resources to create an economy which truly benefits the people? By examining the ideas of community wealth building and inclusive procurement from a local authority and SME perspective, we can extrapolate finings for international comparison and offer an in-depth look at how the execution of this policy can be strengthened to deliver maximum benefit to their communities. The implication is to focus attention on how institutions (public or private), by way of better execution, can enhance the economic resilience of their own local ecosystems/places.

This study aims to build on the dynamic capability view by examining dynamic capabilities associated with public value in public procurement.

A qualitative case study approach is used in this study. The interview and secondary data consist of eight cases of value-creating procurement from four public organizations.

The findings connect dynamic capabilities and public value in terms of innovation generation and promotion, well-functioning supplier markets, public procurement process effectiveness, environmental and social sustainability and quality and availability of products or services.

Dynamic capabilities in public procurement are necessary to improve public procurement.

This study extends understanding of how sensing, seizing and transforming capabilities contribute to public value creation in both innovative and less innovative (i.e. ordinary) procurement scenarios.

Although small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play major roles in most economies in terms of job creation, innovation and contribution to national income, they are often underrepresented in public procurement markets. This paper aims to explore how the dynamic capabilities theory can improve SME participation in public procurement.

Through a systematic literature review, the paper identifies common barriers to the effective participation of SMEs in public procurement and explores the applicability of the dynamic capabilities theory in addressing these barriers.

A theoretical analysis was conducted to identify possible relationships between the factors reported in the literature as barriers to SME participation in public procurement and different components of the dynamic capabilities of firms (i.e. sensing, seizing, reconfiguring and learning). Seven key propositions were generated to guide future research.

Despite its contributions, this paper is based solely on a systematic literature review and theoretical analysis. Future studies could use meta-analysis to review multiple studies relating to the nexus between SMEs and public procurement, hence improving methodological rigour.

The paper contributes to the ongoing debate about whether and how SMEs can leverage their resources and capabilities to develop self-help strategies to improve participation in public procurement, an area yet underexplored in the literature.

This is one of the few studies examining the implications of firm-level capabilities of SME activity in public procurement markets. The findings may be beneficial to SME managers/owners, particularly regarding firms' ability to leverage resources and capabilities to participate effectively in public procurement.

Knowledge is a critical asset that places contractor organisations at a competitive advantage when they take part in competitive tendering. However, a dearth of literature exists on the mechanisms that contractor organisations can adopt to utilise knowledge to gain competitive advantage and win tenders through competitive tendering.

The study adopted an interpretive stance with a qualitative approach that comprised a literature review, 15 expert interviews and three case studies. The literature review and expert interview findings were used to develop an intermediate framework of knowledge value chain (KVC), while the case study findings were used to develop the final KVC framework with the intermediate framework as the basis.

The study developed, in three distinctive steps, a KVC framework based on Powell's (2001) KVC for use by the tendering divisions/units of contractor organisations employing quantity surveyors (QSs) to handle tendering work and to increase their chances of winning tenders.

The study developed a KVC framework for the use of contractor organisations to maximise their chances of winning tenders in the field of quantity surveying.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the structure and dynamics of academic articles relating to public procurement (PP) in the period 1984–2022 (up to May). The researchers also intend to analyse how this knowledge domain has grown since 1984.

A bibliometric analysis was carried out to examine the existing state of PP research. Based on 640 journal articles indexed in the Scopus database and written by 1,247 authors over nearly four decades, a bibliometric analysis was conducted to reveal the intellectual structure of academic works pertaining to PP.

Findings reveal that PP research from Scopus has significantly increased in the past decade. Major journals publishing PP research are International Journal of Procurement Management, Journal of Cleaner Production, Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management and Public Money and Management. Results also indicate that authors’ cooperation network is fragmented, showing limited collaboration among PP researchers. In addition, results suggest that the institutional collaboration network in PP research mirrors what is commonly referred to as the North–South divide, signifying insufficient research collaboration between developed and developing countries’ institutions. According to the co-occurrence keyword network and topic modelling, PP revolves around five main themes, including innovation, corruption, sustainable and green PP, PP contracts and small and medium enterprises. Based on these results, several directions for future research are suggested.

This paper provides an increased understanding of the entire PP field and the potential research directions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first-ever application of bibliometric techniques and topic modelling to examine the development of PP research since 1984 based on scholarly publications extracted from the Scopus database.

This paper develops and tests a model for explaining small and medium-size enterprise (SME) participation and success in public procurement. The model is informed by a capability-based view of public sector tendering that includes relational and procedural dimensions. To test the model a survey was carried out on firms competing for contracts with Irish public sector organizations (n = 3010). The survey was repeated one year later to demonstrate reliability (n = 3092). Overall, the results lend support to the model. Procedural capability is associated with frequency of tendering and typical value of contract sought. Relational capability is not. Procedural and relational capabilities are each significant in accounting for success rates in contract competitions and commercial orientation towards the public sector.

Searching the tender notices that publish every day in open tendering websites is a common way for finding business opportunity in public procurement. The heterogeneity of tender notices from various tendering marketplaces is a challenge for exploiting semantic technologies in the tender search.

Most of the semantic matching approaches require the data to be structured and integrated according to a data model. But the integration process can be expensive and time-consuming especially for multi-source data integration.

In this paper, a product search mechanism that had been developed in an e-procurement platform for matching product e-catalogues is applied to the tender search problem. The search performance has been compared using two procurement vocabularies on searching tender notices from two major tender resources.

The test results show that the matching mechanism is able to find tender notices from heterogeneous resources and different classification systems without transforming the tenders to a uniform data model.

Early involvement of the construction team is increasingly utilized in demanding projects to incorporate versatile expertise in their planning. For public owners this is a challenge since they are obliged to use competitive, transparent team selection based on the ‘most economically advantageous’ criterion which ensures that both price and quality viewpoints are taken into account. In the case of early involvement, the price component naturally does not include the total price, but may consist only of the fee-percentages of competing service providers. This study examines such a selection situation in project alliancing in the European context and seeks to find a way to integrate the fee component in a multi-criteria selection system and determine reasonable fees for different levels of capabilities. The study builds on the performance difference between different capabilities, derived from a survey of practitioners, and determines an indifference curve arithmetically for the planning of a selection method. The influence of the owner‘s risk attitude and risk premiums are also considered exploratively based on the pricing methods of the theory of finance.