Supplierverse co-founders Vishal Mishra and Himanshu Sharma say the goal is simple: make it easier for capable businesses to compete, and easier for buyers to find them.
For a small business owner in the UK, winning a public sector contract can feel like trying to get into a room with no visible door. The skills are there. The price is fair. What’s often missing is a real way in.
New research from Supplierverse, an Innovate UK backed tender bidding technology company, looks at why that happens, and more importantly, what can be done about it. Working with Brunel University of London over the past six months, the team interviewed and surveyed government contracting bodies and SMEs to understand where the process breaks down, and how it could work better for everyone involved. The result is a new guide, How to Make UK Public Procurement More Inclusive: A Practical Guide for SMEs and Buyers.
A familiar story for anyone who has bid for public work
The findings will feel familiar to a lot of small business owners. Contracts bundled too large for a small team to realistically take on. Turnover requirements that have little to do with the actual risk of the job. Insurance and accreditation demanded before a business has even won the work. Tender windows are so tight that only companies with a dedicated bid team stand much of a chance.
Some of these conditions don’t look unreasonable in isolation. Stacked together, they quietly favour whoever won last time and shut the door on everyone else.
The cost of that is easy to underestimate. Interviewees told researchers that a mid-sized public bid can cost an SME somewhere between £7,500 and £8,000 in time and effort, and around half of the suppliers surveyed said they spend 40 hours or more preparing a single submission. Faced with those odds, many capable businesses simply walk away before they submit anything at all. Some who do win still wait 60 to 90 days to be paid through supply chains.
What inclusive procurement could mean for SMEs
This is where the guide tries to look forward rather than just diagnose the problem. Inclusive procurement, done well, doesn’t mean lowering the bar for anyone. It means designing the process so a capable business doesn’t get filtered out before anyone has actually judged whether it can deliver.
For SMEs, that shift could mean spending less time chasing paperwork and more time building the track record that actually wins work. A first successful bid could open the door to a second, then a third, instead of the whole process feeling like a one off gamble. Over time, a fairer route into public contracts gives smaller businesses room to grow, hire, and reinvest in the communities they operate in.
For contracting authorities, a wider and more competitive pool of bidders tends to mean better value for public money, more innovation, and less reliance on the same handful of large suppliers. Everyone does better when more capable businesses are actually able to compete.
“What our research made clear is that the barrier for many SMEs isn’t capability, it’s access,” said Vishal Mishra, Co-Founder and CEO of Supplierverse.ai. “Businesses are often excluded not because they can’t deliver, but because procurement systems are fragmented and hard to navigate. This guide is about closing that gap, for suppliers and buyers alike.”
Himanshu Sharma, Co-Founder and Product Lead at Supplierverse, added: “We wanted this guide to feel practical, not theoretical. If an SME reads it and walks away knowing exactly what to fix in their next bid, or a buyer reads it and rethinks one requirement before their next tender goes live, it’s done its job.”
Research that started at Brunel
The project behind the guide began as an Innovate UK funded research and development collaboration with Brunel University of London. Researchers from Brunel Business School, led by Dr Nan Jiang and Dr Wai Wai Joyce Ko, worked alongside the Supplierverse team on market research, stakeholder engagement, and analysis of the barriers SMEs face. Brunel MBA students also took part through applied innovation workshops connected to the project.
Brunel covered the wider Supplierverse platform launch and this collaboration in more detail. You can read that piece here: https://www.brunel.ac.uk/business-school/news-and-events/news/Supplierverse-AI-launches-Innovate-UK-supported-platform-helping-SMEs-access-public-sector-opportunities
Supplierverse is now inviting SMEs, procurement teams, and industry bodies to read the guide and put its recommendations into practice.
The full guide is free to read at: https://www.supplierverse.ai/resources/reports/inclusive-public-procurement-guide