The last few years it had not been easy for the Dutch Cycling Embassy (DCE). The ambitions were always there, but the finances to those ambitions did not keep pace.
That led to Dutch bicycle experts regularly flew to developing countries or to the US and Canada and in exchange for a plane ticket to give presentations on the Dutch bicycle knowledge. Turnover for the Dutch business resulted there barely out.

' Therefore we make for every country a custom made consortia of public-, private-, knowledge-and social parties that are controlled by one of our participants. For example one of our consortia consists of a municipality like Amsterdam or Nijmegen and offices like Berenschot or Goudappel Coffeng and the University of Twente. Together we approach the customer as the Dutch Cycling Embassy.’

What we see is that our customer prefer doing business with one organization. So our job is to make an offer that can be accepted by the client. One solution is to match a Dutch municipality as partner to a partner city abroad. We are working on this in Sao Paolo. A customer can also choose a procurement procedure which the Dutch Cycling Embassy registers as consortium. And a third option is that the Dutch Cycling Embassy adopt a project.

Read the complete interview with Aletta Koster in Dutch.