Innovation Procurement, Intellectual Property and Supplier Security

Introduction

Chapters 3 and 4 of Title II sit next to each other for a reason. Innovation procurement is about persuading a market to bring its best, least proven ideas to a public buyer. Security and resilience is about the public buyer protecting itself from exactly the kind of dependency that comes from trusting an unproven or unfamiliar supplier with something critical. The 2014 directives touch both themes lightly and separately. This proposal gives each one a dedicated chapter, and — for the first time — a formal set of rules about who ends up owning the intellectual property that gets created in between.

Innovation in Public Procurement

Article 59 sets out three objectives a buyer may pursue when it invokes innovation procurement: getting research results out of the lab and into the market while pulling start-ups, scale-ups and SMEs into that process; building lead markets in strategic sectors, explicitly including interoperability and open-source elements in digital public services; and improving cost-effectiveness against conventional alternatives without giving up quality or scale¹. Article 60 then adds a reporting obligation with real teeth: a buyer has to formally classify a procurement as public procurement of innovation, in the public summary itself, wherever the object of the purchase is a solution with genuinely new characteristics compared with what is already commercially available at scale — and must do so automatically wherever a contract follows a successful innovation procedure, or where an open procedure purchase follows pre-commercial procurement¹. This reporting requirement would enable the Commission to use procurement data…