This article outlines a new framework for how SMEs and contracting authorities can take steps to increase cross-border procurement in the European Union. It offers new suggestions for improving SMEs chances of winning public contracts offered outside their immediate national border, and suggestions for reform in tender evaluation practices that could help SMEs overcome their aversion to "home bias" in public procurement. Despite longstanding legal harmonisation of EU public procurement rules and laws for over 30 years, there have been no significant improvements in the levels of cross-border public procurement activity, which remains stubbornly low. Within the EU there is a disconnection between globalisation trends and trends in cross-border public procurement within the EU. The process of creating common rules for the conduct of public tendering across the EU has failed to address the serious obstacles to cross-border procurement by a range of barriers, including Non-Tariff Barriers (NTB); the lack of obligation to require advertisement of non-threshold contracts on the EU's own TED 2 tender portal; and contracting authorities' 3 behaviour for preferring national suppliers. 4 Although the statistical information explored within this article strongly suggests that current EU policies on transparency, competition, and openness are proving to be largely ineffective at transnational procurement level, our proposed action-based framework developed out of an EU-funded cross-border procurement research project, proposes a new way forward to address the limitations of the current EU Directives. 5 Our proposed actionbased framework identifies what actions need to be implemented in order to achieve the outcomes envisaged by 5 current European Commission recommendations for change. 6 This, combined with the use of new intuitive and emerging technologies we suggest, could be a significant driving force for change in this area. Embracing new technologies in the fashion proposed by our framework, contract opportunities that seemed out of reach geographically,