Last year, governments worldwide spent more than a trillion dollars building new cities from scratch. This is bound to create many new unprecedented opportunities for construction tendering.

The Charter Cities Institute, a think tank that studies the emergence of these new cities, recently published a map documenting the spread of these cities. Examples include NEOM, in Saudi Arabia, Forest City, in Malaysia and Telosa, in the United States.

Many of these new city projects have unique tendering processes that are different from the rules that normally apply in those countries. For example, NEOM in Saudi Arabia has an Innovation Hub. This center allows smaller companies to bypass normal bidding processes to help implement less conventional technologies to solve major issues, most notably the water supply.

Masdar City, a new city project in the UAE, established Tenderd Limited, a fully digital platform to track tendering and bidding. Similarly to NEOM, Masdar also changed its rules to favor smaller innovative companies that would normally be unable to participate in this type of process. China’s Sponge City project is a plan to retrofit many of its new cities built in the 1990s to absorb and store rainwater. Sponge City had a unique tendering process that would prioritize community inclusion, environmentalism, and new technologies over more conventional metrics like price.

In most bidding processes, being nonstandard is dangerous. Governments hate “new.” Instead, procurement officials prefer tried and true methods, teams with conventional qualifications and resumes, and well-known brand name companies.

Many new cities are vanity projects that are built by governments to highlight their innovativeness. As a result, governments building more cities will be willing to work with smaller, less conventional bidders.

This does not mean that new cities present a free-for-all. Far from it. Governments are fundamentally conservative, especially when it comes to tendering processes. Instead, it means that companies will need to walk a fine line in between conformity and innovation.

This will create many opportunities for smaller, more nimble companies who can slip through the altered bidding processes; but be a disadvantage for larger providers.