Project Goals

Goals

The project studies the strategic use of pre-commercial procurement, innovation partnership and crowdsourcing by public administrations to address citizens’ wellbeing. Despite the growing interest around the use of these practices, there are still relatively few empirical cases, at least in Europe, and many of them are very recent. Probably also because of this, the literature has not yet clearly identified what are (if any) the benefits of these practices compared to traditional public procurement of goods and services.

Focusing on the Italian case, the project aims to fill this gap. In particular, the project will:

- Map pre-commercial procurement, innovation partnerships and public crowdsourcing initiatives carried out by public administrations and define typologies according to their peculiar characteristics;

- Analyse a selection of cases, in order to identify the benefits they produced - also in a comparative perspective -, the problems and obstacles;

- Define a conceptual framework on the benefits of innovation procurement and their evaluation, and outline policy recommendations.