The System

The solutions to the most pressing problems of our municipalities already exist: in labs, in start-ups, in pilot projects, often in the neighbouring town. What is missing is the system that gets them to where they are needed.

The diagram shows something that looks paradoxical at first: the pressure on our municipalities is high, and it is growing. Climate crisis, housing shortage, crumbling infrastructure. The political will to act is there. And yet working solutions barely arrive.

Three brakes that reinforce each other

Every municipality develops solutions from scratch, as if others had not already spent years on them. That costs time nobody has. Bureaucracy, procurement law, funding conditions, lines of responsibility, is built for stability, not for speed. And the money that could finance transformation does not find its way: private capital shies away from small, dissimilar projects, public funding programmes are complex, municipal budgets are tight.

The result is not a failure of individual people. It is a system that blocks itself.

Solutions off the shelf

.GUT starts at the three points the diagram shows as bottlenecks. Not with the next pilot project in the next city, but with a shelf from which thousands of municipalities can take finished, proven solutions.

Solutions are not developed for one municipality but described so that they work everywhere. The bureaucracy problem is solved once, with procurement route and funding logic, and the result is available to every municipality. And financing is treated as part of the solution from the start, not pieced together afterwards.

That this works is shown by the GdW framework agreement for serial construction, the modular school buildings in Berlin and the Hamburger Häuser. Each for a single owner. .GUT does it for all municipalities.

Configure instead of develop

Every solution that goes through this route is repeatable afterwards. Not as a blueprint that each municipality first has to adapt, but as a finished unit that it configures rather than develops: size, site and heat source are set, everything else is described, tender-ready and backed by a financing concept of grants and private funds. That is the difference between a pilot project and a solution you can procure.

From council resolution to framework agreement

The route from many individual projects to a solution that can be procured together runs over three stages.

Pool

Municipalities planning the same find each other. What runs separately in a thousand town halls today becomes visible as shared demand: how many municipalities are building a school, renewing a heating grid, refurbishing a pool right now. The municipalities exchange experience, learn from each other and face providers and investors as a group. Pooling is the basis for everything else, because only counted, shared demand makes standards and joint procurement possible. And only pooled demand makes private capital reachable: no investor finances a single pool, thirty identical pools they will.

Standardise

As soon as enough municipalities plan the same, the standards workshop begins. The municipalities describe together what the solution must do. Providers say what of it can be delivered today and align their solutions to it. The result is an open standard: requirements, procurement route, financing. It separates what applies to all from what each municipality sets itself. Part of the standard is a financing concept: which grants fit, what the municipality carries itself, and where private investors come in. Because the standard applies to many identical projects, they can assess that once for all of them instead of for each one.

Procure

Municipalities that want to use the standard jointly tender a framework agreement. One procedure instead of a hundred. Then each municipality calls off what it needs, with a finished financing concept and without a tender of its own. Providers bid once and deliver to many. And investors finance not a project but a series. Everyone shares in the savings.

Who commissions, and who pays

The model only works if all three sides win. Municipalities get solutions they could not procure on their own, with less effort, lower costs and a financing concept that is already in place. Providers get a market they do not have to conquer municipality by municipality. Investors get projects large and uniform enough to take on capital.

The municipalities are the commissioning party. They decide which projects are pooled, what the standard requires and whether they procure under it. .GUT is paid within this process by the provider side: for the work on the standard, and at the framework agreement with a share of the savings that standard and pooling create. For municipalities, the route to the standard is free. Providers do not buy influence with that, but the chance to take part in a market whose rules the municipalities set.

What .GUT therefore does not sell: demand. No contact details, no lists, no brokering of orders. That is exactly why municipalities talk to us, and exactly why providers sit at the table with them in the workshop.

A standard belongs to those who use it

A standard that only .GUT can read would be a new bottleneck. That is why the standards are open, and why they are written in a form that municipalities and providers can use without us.

What a standard contains

A standard describes what a solution must do, not which product it should be. It is structured in areas, for a school say building, energy, equipment, outdoor spaces and operation. For each area it lists the requirements and how their fulfilment is checked. Added to that are the procurement route and the financing concept. And it separates what applies to all municipalities from what each sets itself: size, site, heat source.

This format is called OpenM3S. It is open so that any municipality can adopt a standard into its tender, with or without .GUT. And it is uniform so that standards for different projects are built the same way and providers read them the same way. From the adopted version on, every standard is published. All providers read the same and bid on the same terms.

How mature a solution is

Before a municipality procures, it needs to know whether a solution is finished or still being tested. For that, .GUT rates every solution on a scale from 1 to 7, the Solution Readiness Level. The lower levels stand for idea and prototype, the middle ones for solutions running in first municipalities, the upper ones for solutions established in the market that can be procured under a standard. Municipalities see what they can order. Providers see what they are still missing.

From Germany to Europe

.GUT starts in Germany, with around 11,000 municipalities and projects that look alike everywhere. But the projects do not stop at the border. Schools, heating grids and pools are procured across Europe by the same principles, under common procurement law. A standard that works in Germany can be translated. A framework agreement that runs here can be repeated in other countries. That is the growth path: not the next municipality, but the next country.

Next

You are planning a project in your municipality? For municipalities

You have a solution that should reach many municipalities? For solution providers

What is taking shape right now: Standard school construction