EU R&D Procurement: Competition, IP Ownership and Commercialisation

Introduction

Tabled the same day as the Public Procurement Act covered across the last ten parts of this newsletter, the European Innovation Act does something the main Regulation does not attempt: it writes a complete, dedicated rulebook for buying research and development itself, rather than treating R&D as one flavour of contract among many. COM(2026) 567 final runs to 41 articles across four chapters, and it carves R&D procurement out of the general Regulation's scope entirely — a public buyer procuring genuine research and development follows this instrument instead¹. The centrepiece is not a procedure. It is a default answer to a question public procurement has never resolved cleanly: when taxpayer money funds a breakthrough, who owns it afterwards?

Four Goals

The general principles article ties every subsequent rule back to four stated aims: strengthening the Union's industrial base, advancing climate and environmental objectives, supporting a fair and inclusive society, and protecting the Union's economic security and strategic independence¹. Buyers and bidders are both placed under an explicit duty not to circumvent the Regulation, and a buyer cannot design an R&D procurement specifically to dodge its scope or artificially narrow competition — language that reads as a direct response to the way public buyers have historically used ordinary consultancy or services contracts to buy something that was, in substance, R&D, without ever triggering R&D-specific scrutiny.

Access to an R&D procurement is not automatically open to the whole world either. The default is that participation is limited to economic operators originating in Member States,…