"Promoting Innovation through Public Procurement: Best practice & networking"

In the past three years, the European Commission and several public authorities in Europe have launched a number of initiatives that stimulate the public procurement of innovations and stimulate innovative public procurement itself.

These include Green Public Procurement (GPP), eProcurement, social considerations, variants in procurement, technical dialogue or forward commitment procurement methodologies, as well as Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) or research oriented public procurements. Stakeholder and expert communities, training and guidance are being developed.

To start building a European critical mass in the field of Public Procurement of Innovation, there is a need to facilitate the networking and exchanging of best practice among public procurers and relevant stakeholders. This conference aims to promote a connected community of stakeholders and identify possible joint actions. More specifically, its objectives are:

• To clarify the relationships between networks and stakeholders (existing ones and new ones) that can facilitate/ promote public procurement of innovations: innovation agencies, Enterprise Europe Network partners, experts, industry, procuring facilitators;
• To identify what tools are best used to help these people and where there is potential for joint actions.

Public procurers, policy makers and other key stakeholders for implementing pre-commercial procurement are warmly invited to this conference. More than 80 participants are expected to attend this free and open to all event. The event’s draft agenda can be found here.

Participants that are interested in participating in the conference are kindly requested to express their interest by emailing lieve.bos@ec.europa.eu and bertrand.wert@ec.europa.eu until the end of January 2010.

Event email: lieve.bos@ec.europa.eu and/or bertrand.wert@ec.europa.eu