Research & Innovation :: Private Investment :: Pre-Commercial Procurement
Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP)
By acting as technologically demanding first buyers, public procurers can drive innovation from the demand side. In addition to improving the quality and effectiveness of public services, this can help create opportunities for European companies to take international leadership in new markets.
The public sector in the EU, as elsewhere in the world, is faced with important societal challenges. These include ensuring high-quality affordable healthcare to cope with the impacts of an ageing population, the fight against climate change, improving energy efficiency, ensuring higher quality and better access to education, and being more effective dealing with security threats. Addressing such challenges can require new and better solutions.
Some of the required improvements are so technologically demanding that either no commercially stable solution exists yet on the market, or existing solutions exhibit shortcomings which require new R&D. By developing forward-looking procurement strategies that include R&D procurement to develop new solutions that address these challenges, the public sector can have a significant impact on the mid to long term efficiency and effectiveness of public services, as well as on the innovation performance and the competitiveness of European industry.
This is generally not the case yet in Europe. Public procurement uses taxpayers' money and so is traditionally risk averse, meaning that procurement by the public sector does not stimulate innovation as much as it could. However, there are ways to reduce these risks in R&D procurements to a level public authorities are used to work with in public procurement in general, whilst still resulting in better-value-for-money products at the end for the procurer, and in more interesting market opportunities for participating companies.
How to square this circle? Pre-commercial procurement is an approach for procuring R&D services which enables public procurers to:
- share the risks and benefits of designing, prototyping and testing new products and services with the suppliers, without involving State aid;
- create the optimum conditions for wide commercialisation and take-up of R&D results through standardisation and/or publication;
- pool the efforts of several procurers.
By acting as technologically demanding first buyers of new R&D, public procurers can drive innovation from the demand side. This enables European public authorities to innovate the provision of public services faster and creates opportunities for companies in Europe to take international leadership in new markets. Reducing time to market by developing a strong European home market for innovative products and services is key for Europe to create growth and jobs in quickly evolving markets such as ICT.
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/pcp/ - For full details on planned events and funding opportunities in the area of pre-commercial procurement
Contact
Project Officer pre-commercial procurement: lieve.bos@ec.europa.eu
