Based on good practices in OECD and partner countries, this report analyses the state of play of procurement for innovation and provides a flexible framework focusing on 9 areas to promote it.

This book focuses on Public Procurement for Innovation. Public Procurement for Innovation is a specific demand-side innovation policy instrument. It occurs when a public organization places an order for a new or improved product to fulfill certain need

Innovation in public procurement is essential for sustainable and inclusive growth in an increasingly globalized economy. To achieve that potential, both the promises and the perils of innovation must be investigated, including the risks and opportunities of joint procurement across borders in the European Union and the United States. This in-depth research investigates innovation in public procurement from three different perspectives. First, leading academics and practitioners assess the purchase of innovation, with a particular focus on urban public contracting in smart cities involving meta-infrastructures, public-private partnership arrangements and smart contracts. A second line of inquiry looks for ways to encourage innovative suppliers. Here, the collected authors draw on emerging lessons from the US and Europe, to explore both the costs and the benefits of spurring innovation through procurement. A third perspective looks to various innovations in the procurement process itself, with a focus on the effects of joint and cross-border procurement in the EU and US landscapes. The chapters review new technologies and platforms, the increasingly automated means of selecting suppliers, and the related efficiencies that “big data” can bring to public procurement. Expanding on research in the editors’ prior volume, Integrity and Efficiency in Sustainable Public Contracts: Balancing Corruption Concerns in Public Procurement Internationally (Bruylant 2014), this volume builds on a series of academic conferences and exchanges to address these issues from sophisticated academic, institutional and practical perspectives, and to point the way to future research on the contractual models that are emerging from new procurement technologies.

Public Technology Procurement and Innovation studies public technology procurement as an instrument of innovation policy. In the past few years, public technology procurement has been a relatively neglected topic in the theoretical and research literature on the economics of innovation. Similarly, preoccupation with `supply-side' measures has led policy-makers to avoid making very extensive use of this important `demand-side' instrument. These trends have been especially pronounced in the European Union. There, as this book will argue, existing legislation governing public procurement presents obstacles to the use of public technology procurement as a means of stimulating and supporting technological innovation. Recently, however, there has been a gradual re-awakening of practical interest in such measures among policy-makers in the EU and elsewhere. For these and other related measures, this volume aims to contribute to a serious reconsideration of public technology procurement from the complementary standpoints of innovation theory and innovation policy.

This book maps the latest developments in public procurement of innovation policy in various contexts and analyzes the evolution and development of the various policy solutions in broader institutional contexts. In doing so, it addresses significant theoretical and practical gaps: On the one hand, there is an emerging interest in public procurement as a policy tool for spurring innovation; yet on the other hand, the current theory, with some notable exceptions, is guided and often constrained by historical applications, above all in the defence industries. By carefully examining the cases of eleven countries, the book points to the existence of much more nuanced public procurement on the innovation policy landscape than has been acknowledged in the academic and policy debates to date.

Max Rolfstam examines the increasing emphasis on public procurement as a means to stimulate innovation and the theoretical implications of this policy development. While regular public procurement may be regarded as the outcome of anonymous market processes, public procurement of innovation must be understood as a special case of innovation, where social processes, and consequently the institutions governing these social processes, need to be considered. This book contributes to our understanding with a detailed institutional analysis of the public procurement of innovation. The author draws on an institutional framework that underscores the importance of conducting a multilevel institutional analysis. Unlike earlier studies that reduced public procurement challenges to a legal issue, this book offers insights of more holistic nature. Academics, students and researchers with an interest in innovation policy will find this book to be an informative and fascinating read. It will also provide an invaluable reference tool on how public procurement can be used as an innovation policy tool for policymakers at both national and EU levels.

This insightful book provides readers with a practical and theoretical explanation of the ways in which the new, tailor-made Innovation Partnership Procedure can be used throughout all Member States in the European Union. With a focus on the Procurement Directive for the public sector (Directive 2014/24/EU), Pedro Cerqueira Gomes argues that innovation is a crucial policy of the EU that must be extended to public procurement – implying interesting harmonisation challenges, mostly regarding the use of the Innovation Partnership Procedure and the national administrative law traditions of the Member States.