Pixabay Earlier this month we attended Ivalua Now Europe, you can read our observations from the Ivalua keynotes in our overview here. Of course Ivalua NOW wasn’t all about Ivalua – they had some excellent sessions on a variety of topical issues, one of which took our eye. Natacha Tréhan PhD is a Professor in Purchasing Management from the University of Grenoble Alpes. She gave an informed and thoughtful presentation on the contribution of procurement to economic renewal. She believes “we can no longer copy and paste the past, the Covid crisis has highlighted the urgent need to rethink business models.” She explained the key future trends and how they impact business models and why innovation is crucial to economic renaissance. It was good to hear a concise explanation of what we mean by innovation in the procurement sense, and how procurement needs to rethink its role in innovation projects to explore new ecosystems and choose and manage suppliers to increase the success of innovation projects. “The role of procurement is to contribute to the transformation of the enterprise business model and to help the enterprise create data-driven strategies that are sustainable,” she said.