Call for: Business Intelligence Services

Buyer: European Commission, DG GROW – Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs, Brussels

Duration: 24 months

Estimated value excluding VAT: €1.550.000

Deadline for receipt of tenders: 06/01/2026

Description: The European Commission’s Directorate General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs (DG GROW) has set up a new team to centralise the collection, analysis, and dissemination of business intelligence. The focus is hereby on company-level information and insights with a bearing on Europe’s economic security or competitiveness (e.g. interrupted supply-chains, planned relocations, …). DG GROW is seeking a contractor to help gathering Business Intelligence, inter alia by providing a pool of industry experts that can be consulted on request, running quick surveys of enterprises in specific fields and undertaking desk-research.

Background: The global economic landscape has undergone a profound transformation, heralding a new era of unprecedented challenges and threats.

Supply-chain disruptions since the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, high energy prices, risks of “weaponisation” of Europe’s dependencies, geopolitical tensions including on the tariffs front, have led to higher levels of systemic uncertainty. This emphasises the urgent need to boost the EU’s economic and industrial resilience and to diversify supplies in the face of these challenges. Changing patterns in globalization and a world-wide reallocation of supply chains risk leading towards an increasingly fragmented world, with impacts on the economic security and stability of European businesses.

At the same time, the rapid emergence of disruptive technologies, such as AI, is revolutionising the global economy, presenting both opportunities and challenges for European enterprises. To remain competitive and thrive in this new landscape, it is essential that Europe harnesses the potential of these technological advancements, while also mitigating related risks and ensuring that European businesses are equipped to adapt and evolve in response to the changing circumstances.

Faced with those sweeping changes, the Commission adopted the ‘European Economic Security Strategy’ in June 2023. The document sets out the EU’s comprehensive approach to minimising security risks stemming from geopolitical tensions and rapid technological change. Specifically, the strategy defines four risk areas that European economies face, namely (i) risks to resilience of supply chains, including energy security, (ii) risks to the physical and cyber security of critical infrastructure (iii) risks related to technology security and technology leakage (iv) risks of weaponisation of economic dependencies or economic coercion. In response to these risks, the strategy outlines three key priorities: (1) promoting our own competitiveness; (2) protecting ourselves from economic security risks; and (3) partnering with the broadest possible range of countries who share our concerns or interests on economic security.

The prominence of economic security considerations for the new Commission taking office in 2024 also showed in the creation of a Commissioners’ Project Group on Economic Security, which brings together several Commissioners whose portfolios are relevant to economic security, ensuring cross-sectoral coordination and implementation.

At par, and with a view to better understanding the challenges to Europe’s competitiveness and preparing the ground to overcome them, the Commission tasked former ECB president Mario Draghi to prepare a comprehensive analysis, the so-called Draghi report. The report, published in 2024, emphasises that Europe will no longer be able to rely on many of the factors that have supported growth in the past. It provides a clear diagnosis and concrete recommendations to put Europe onto a different trajectory, focusing on three core areas for action to drive growth and competitiveness. Firstly, Europe must profoundly refocus its collective efforts on closing the innovation gap with the US and China, especially in advanced technologies. The second key area for action mentioned is a joint plan for decarbonisation and competitiveness. The third area for action is increasing security and reducing dependencies.

The discussions at the Commissioners’ Project Group on Economic Security highlighted the need for a particular type of information to inform policy action in these turbulent times: Business Intelligence (hereinafter “BI”). This information can prove particularly valuable both to follow up on the EU’s economic security and competitiveness agendas.

Compared to other data and information, the key features of BI are:

▪ timeliness: Business Intelligence should identify threats and opportunities for EU companies at an early stage so that policy intervention can influence outcomes

▪ granularity: the focus of the information is typically at the level of individual companies and/or specific technologies, thus complementing readily available information at macro level

▪ novelty: ideally BI should deliver insights which are not (yet) publicly available, thus often resulting from direct interaction with economic actors, industry experts, etc.

To cater for the needs of the Project Group, as well as other Commission services involved in the restoration of economic security and competitiveness, DG GROW created a new Business Intelligence service, which is an integral part of the DG’s ‘Chief Economist Team’. The service aims to centralise the collection, analysis and dissemination of Business Intelligence for the whole of the Commission services.

The new Business Intelligence service has a relatively small number of permanent staff and is seeking specific expertise in a number of important economic sectors/critical technologies. This call for tenders thus aims at establishing a contract for the provision of BI services, supporting the new DG GROW service in fulfilling its mandate.

Objectives: The main objective of the contract is to assist the new Business Intelligence service in DG GROW in its collection and analysis of Business Intelligence that:

• Enables anticipatory policy thinking on major shifts, risks, or opportunities in key industrial sectors;

• Enhances the Commission’s readiness and response capacity in situations where urgent policy action might be warranted (e.g. sudden corporate restructuring, emerging trade barriers, investment shifts, or technological disruptions);

• Informs policymaking with credible and concrete evidence rooted in the language and concerns of business actors, complementing broader information sources such as official statistics;

• Strengthens the EU’s ability to identify vulnerabilities and competitive advantages across industrial ecosystems.