How Governments Support Innovation through Public Procurement. Comparing Evidence from 11 Countries

This paper summarizes the main findings from the 11 country chapters presented in our forthcoming edited volume, Public Procurement, Innovation and Policy: International Perspectives(Springer, 2013); the paper appears in the book as the concluding chapter. We categorize the current public procurement of innovation (PPI) policy practices and explore the factors behind policy developments. Although countries have followed rather different paths in PPI policy-making, we detect a certain general PPI trajectory over the past three decades . while during the industrial policy era up until the 1980s public procurement was mostly used to induce new technologies and entire industries via direct public technology procurement programs as well as R&D procurement, the emerging policy consensus puts an emphasis on more holistic ideas and sees public procurement as a more generic tool in promoting innovation. We conclude, however, that today there is no single dominant policy approach governments follow and that the actual PPI policy measures implemented are still cautious and indirect rather than substantial and direct, and that the very process of public procurement plays a far more modest role in the actual implementation of PPI policies than expected.