Public procurement of innovation for a better world: a consolidation or a new beginning?

Both public procurement and innovation are well-established research themes in contemporary social science. The cross-fertilisation of these two themes – the special concern for how public procurement can be used to stimulate innovation – has until recently lived a more tranquil existence. In a way this is strange, since the idea to associate public contracts with secondary policies and supplier incentives for some kind of innovation or social improvement is as old as the public-sector notion itself (McCrudden 2004). Public procurement in the form of technology procurement projects was also used as a means to implement technology/sector policies in the mid decades of the twentieth century (e.g. Morris 1990; Edquist, Hommen, and Tsipouri 2000), and many authors have emphasised the strategic role different forms of public procurement can play as drivers for innovation (e.g. Rothwell 1984; Geroski 1990; Dalpé, DeBresson, and Xiaoping 1992; Gregersen 1992; Fridlund 1999; Palmberg 2002; Berggren and Laestadius 2003; Aschhoff and Sofka 2009; Eliasson 2010; Guerzoni and Raiteri 2015). Increasingly, public procurement is conceived of as a means to support smalland medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) (Loader 2013). The notion that public procurement can be used as an instrument for qualitative change is also well established, for example, to develop green, sustainable or energy efficient technologies (e.g. International Energy Agency 2000; Erdmenger 2003, Walker et al. 2012); to replace inferior technologies through market transformation (Neij 2001); to decrease climate impacts (Nissinen, Mattinen, and Alhola 2012) or to facilitate adoption of innovative health care technologies (Phillips et al. 2007). Commitment to research on public procurement and innovation concerns in that sense a process of re-discovery both of a practice and a research field, as well as managing the balance act of drawing on “old” knowledge while in the same time adopt to the current situation. The neo-liberal ideals that came to prevail the last decades of the twentieth century seem to have not only stalled a more profound continuation of the theme. The loss of both market power and competence that came in the wake of the liberalisation also reduced both the ability and rationales for public agencies’ involvement in innovation-generating procurement projects (Callender and Mathews 2002; Gavras et al. 2006), causing the need to re-think then-established roles among actors and forms of collaboration (IVA 2003). What can be seen as a rebirth came by the Millennium shift, in the wake of the Lisbon agenda developed for the European Union where public procurement was identified as one instrument for dealing with the challenges imposed by global competition and the shift towards a knowledge-driven economy. Central to this policy development was the idea that public procurers could stimulate innovation and learning from “the demand-side” ultimately to increase competitive advantage and growth (Edler and Georghiou 2007). The rebirth came with a qualitative change in the sense that public procurement became an instrument associated with a more generic notion of knowledge policy, where knowledge and learning become central elements in policy development (Lundvall and Borrás 2005; Rolfstam 2014).