Incentivising innovation-friendly procurement
The public sector is a huge potential customer for development and deployment of innovative solutions. therefore, public procurement is key to pull innovations out of the lab into the market. However, innovation procurement is still underused in Europe compared to other parts of the world.
The Draghi, Letta and European Court of Auditors reports signalled that the EU legal framework is not sufficiently incentivising public buyers to procure in an innovation-friendly way. Therefore, in November 2024 the EC Directorate-General for Research and Innovation appointed a group of experts from 33 countries (the 27 EU Member States, the UK, US, Canada, Japan, China, South Korea) with the task to recommend solutions for tackling this issue.
The expert group has developed specific recommendations for EU action, based on analysis of how EU Member States and other parts of the world are stimulating innovation procurement.
The experts’ findings come at an important moment, as the EC embarks on several new initiatives to facilitate the access of innovative companies to the EU public procurement market: the EU startup and scaleup strategy, the EU Innovation Act and the revision of the EU public procurement directives.
More information
- The terms of reference defines the scope of the expert assignment and contains the list of the experts involved
- On 20 February 2025 the experts organized an online webinar to inform stakeholders across Europe about the preliminary results and lessons learnt (agenda, video recording and slides).
- The detailed country assessments for the 33 countries analysed and the final report with the expert recommendations are expected by end of April 2025.