Boosting green economic recovery and open strategic autonomy in Strategic Digital Technologies through pre-commercial procurement (PCP action)

Projects are expected to contribute to the following outcomes:

• Bring to the market new green, digital solutions that can increase Europe’s resilience and preparedness to tackle the circular economy and climate challenge, whilst strengthening EU open strategic autonomy in digital technologies;
• Advancing public sector modernization by capitalising on the transformational power of digital technologies to bring radical improvements to the quality and efficiency of public services;
• Leveraging PCP to drive innovation and increase resilience in the supply chain by opening up opportunities for innovative digitised companies, in particular SMEs and Startups, to access the public procurement market and scale up their business;
• Increased opportunities for wide market uptake and economies of scale for the supply side through increased demand for innovative green solutions, wide publication of results and where relevant contribution to standardisation, regulation or certification.

By closing the gap between supply and demand in a way that reinforces EU open strategic autonomy, PCPs can make a key contribution to economic recovery and growth[1]. As the future is one of green digital growth[2], European public procurers need to lead by example by procuring more green and more digital. This topic therefore focuses on forward looking procurement of R&D to bring to the market new green, digital solutions that can increase Europe’s resilience and preparedness to tackle the circular economy and climate challenge.

This topic addresses Europe’s Achilles heel on the road towards a green and digital economic recovery, the lack and fragmentation of public demand for innovative solutions[3]. While it is well known that public sector modernisation and economic growth depend heavily on the use of ICTs, European investments on innovation procurement in ICTs are still lagging behind with a factor 3 compared to other leading global economies. Underinvestment is the biggest in particular for R&D procurement (factor 5)[4]. Europe’s startups and SMEs are indispensable in delivering the required innovations. As past experience shows that pre-commercial procurement opens up the procurement market for startups and enables the public sector to address societal challenges more effectively, Europe’s Startup community[5] as well as public procurers[6] have requested the Commission and Member States to increase investments in PCP.

This topic supports public buyers to collectively implement PCPs to drive innovation from the demand side and open up wider commercialisation opportunities for companies in Europe to take international leadership in new markets for strategic digital technologies that can deliver greener solutions. The aim is to leverage PCP to encourage the development and to provide a first customer reference for the piloting, installation and validation of breakthrough innovations.

Addressing public sector transformation typically requires combinations of different cross-cutting technologies and cooperation across public sector actors. The topic is thus open to proposals from all domains of public sector activity to address public sector challenges that require innovative ICT based solutions. It is open both to proposals requiring improvements mainly based on one specific ICT technology, and those requiring end-to-end solutions that need cross-cutting combinations of different ICT technologies. The work will complement PCP Actions foreseen under other topics.

Proposals should demonstrate sustainability of the action beyond the life of the project. They should demonstrate how the project is anchored in a clear strategy to fuel economic recovery in a sustainable way through stronger early adoption of innovative green solutions. Activities covered should include cooperation with policy makers to reinforce the national policy frameworks and mobilise substantial additional national budgets for PCP and innovation procurement in general beyond the scope of the project.

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content is not a mandatory requirement

[1] Impacts of EU funded PCPs show 20%-30% efficiency and quality improvements in public services, doubling of the amount of public procurement directly awarded to startups/SMEs, a factor 20 increase in the amount of cross-border contract award to startups/SMEs and a factor 4 additional financing secured by startups/SMEs. The use of place of performance and IPR/commercialization conditions that fuel commercialization in Europe in PCPs also contributes to EU open strategic autonomy.

PCP showcases: see e.g. impacts of PCPs that commercialised greener solutions

[2] ‘public authorities need to lead by example…’, Green deal communication, December 2019

[3] ‘A key factor in engineering economic turnaround will be the adoption of innovations... Europe’s focus should be primarily on ICT-using sectors because ICT-producing sectors alone are unlikely to provide significant productivity increases to the economy... The EU and governments can do this through their own procurement.’, Report for EU Parliament, Oct 2018

[4] SMART 2016/0040 that benchmarked European investments and policy frameworks for innovation procurement (study results to be presented and published in September-October 2020)

[5] Startup Europe Summit recommendations, March 2019

[6] Results of a survey carried out by the EU among procurers that participated in past EU funded PCP and PPI actions (see slide 28 for results of survey). Another specific survey, among procurers that participated in POV and PCP actions in the security domain, lead to the same conclusion that procurers want to more regular, annual open PCP calls.

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