“…Even where government targets for small business engagement in public contracts are set, achieving these targets is problematic (Kidalov & Snider, ), and there are straightforward reasons for this. First, despite private sector supply chain research showing the importance of longer term, more integrated relationships with suppliers (Cousins, Handfield, et al., ; Cousins, Lawson & Squire, ; Mentzer et al., ; Zhang et al., ), the strict legal and accountability frameworks within which public procurement has to operate can be constraining (Ya Ni & Bretschneider, ) and can impede public procurement practitioners’ abilities to collaborate with suppliers on complex details of specifications associated with larger infrastructure projects (Lenferink, Tillema & Arts, ). A more distant relationship with public procurement practitioners and their tendency to over‐specify contract requirements, rather than procure outcomes, also inhibits innovative suppliers’ abilities to secure public contracts (Uyarra, Edler, Garcia‐Estevez, Georghiou & Yeow, ).…”