Public procurement notice: Prior Information Notice Without Call For Competition
Published: 2017-05-05
Buyer: Directorate General for Maritime Policy (DGPM)
Country: PT
Contract type: Services
CPV classification: 22114300 | 32533000 | 32534000 | 34712200 | 35631200
Estimated value: 2769106 EUR
EU fund: Horizon Europe

Technical requirements: Pre-commercial procurement (PCP) to buy R&D (research and development) services to bridge Innovative Downstream Earth Observation (EO) and Copernicus enabled Services for Integrated maritime environment, surveillance and security — MARINE-EO.
This PIN announces an open market consultation and provides information at an early stage on the expected starting date and purchase volume for the MARINE-EO pre-commercial procurement (PCP) which seeks to establish EO-based services covering sea-basins of Mediterranean, Atlantic and Arctic adapting Copernicus data and information on the Marine Environment in order to meet the demand of the procurers in the thematic areas of Marine monitoring and Maritime Security. MARINE-EO overall idea is the use of PCP schema in the development of innovative beyond the-state-of the art downstream applications which meet the demand of maritime authorities and stakeholders leveraging on the existing Copernicus Services and other products from the Copernicus portfolio.
The aim of this procurement is to trigger new solutions to be developed and tested to address the following common challenge: develop, test and validate a bundle of Copernicus-based services bringing incremental or radical innovations in the field of maritime awareness accompanied with ‘support’ services that will standardize the way EO are used for maritime awareness in regards of operational, technological, semantic and legal interoperability issues. The majority of the R&D work done in the PCP will be located in EU and H2020 Associated Countries.
The selected operators will retain ownership of the intellectual property rights (IPRs) that they generate during the PCP and will be able to use them to exploit the full market potential of the developed solutions i.e. beyond the buyers group (Public Authorities and Policy makers and other research institutes).
— the members of the buyers group and the EU institutions, bodies, offices or agencies have the right to access results, on a royalty-free basis, for their own use and grant (or to require the contractors to grant) non-exclusive licences to third parties to exploit the results under fair and reasonable conditions (without the right to sub-license);
— the contractors will have to transfer ownership of the IPRs to the members of the buyers group if they fail to comply with their obligation to commercially exploit the results within a given period as identified in the contract or use the results to the detriment of the public interests, including security interests.
The procurement will be carried out jointly by the following organisations (the buyers group): Direção-Geral de Política do Mar (DGPM), Ministerio del Interior (GUCI), Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR), Fundo Regional Para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FRCT) and Norwegian Coastal Administration (NCA), (see https://www.marine-eo.eu/). DGPM will act as the lead procurer and will coordinate the joint procurement in the name and on behalf of the other organisations.
The procurement will take the form of a pre-commercial procurement (PCP) under which R&D service contracts will be awarded to R&D providers in parallel in a phased approach. This will make it possible to compare competing alternative solutions. Each selected operator will be awarded a framework agreement that covers three R&D phases: solution design, prototyping, original development and validation and testing of a limited set of first products or services. After each phase, intermediate evaluations will be carried out to select the best of the competing solutions. The contractors with the best-value-for-money solutions will be offered a specific contract for the next phase.
Testing is expected to take place in Marine-EO partners' premises and other places where mandatory evaluation is foreseen to be carried out. This testing may also serve as a first customer test reference for the contractors.
The procurement procedure is expected to start in January 2018 and the tender in June 2018 ending in August 2020.
In preparation for this PCP, all interested operators are invited to take part in an open market consultation (regardless of their geographic location, the size or governance structure of their organisation). The open market consultation will provide an overview on the procurement objectives, the PCP process and the main clauses of the contract. It will be held in English.
2) Allows the consortium to gain better insights on the market, such as the state-of-the-art technology and future developments.
3) Engage the market stakeholders in the procurement preparation phase in order to increase the probability of a successful procurement procedure.
— 12.5.2017 — Request for Information — will be published a market consultation questionnaire — available on the website https://marine-eo.eu/request-information-rfi
— 12.7.2017 — Industrial Day workshop in Lisbon, Portugal where interested suppliers are requested to register on the following link: https://marine-eo.eu/event/industry-day