Innovative Public Procurement – IPP

Innovation Public Procurement designed to meet the Europe 2020 strategy objective of achieving investment in R&D equivalent to 3% of the European Union’s GDP, consists of administrative action to promote innovation which, through public procurement, aims to boost the development of new innovative markets by focusing not on supply but, above all, on demand.

The promotion of innovation is often structured around supply: companies, according to their own criteria, present their projects and submit them to the corresponding selection process, in the hope that they will be selected and receive the funding they need for their development (subsidy from competitive programmes).

As an alternative to these more traditional channels, the IPP prefigures a scheme in which it is the public administrations that express their needs and give companies the possibility of proposing solutions, proceeding to their contracting through tendering processes (purchase of innovation).

In this way, the IPP pursues the following objectives:

The improvement of public services through the incorporation of innovative goods or services.
The promotion of business innovation.
The promotion of the internationalisation of innovation using the local public market as a launch or reference client.

The IPP can be materialized in two contracting modalities, although Project MedeA will tender its respective Challenges (Lots) in the modality of Pre-commercial Public Procurement or Innovative Technology Procurement (ITP), which consists of the public procurement of a good or service that does not exist at the time of purchase but can be developed in a reasonable period of time (12 to 24 months). This purchase requires the development of new or improved technology in order to meet the requirements demanded by the buyer.

The tenders for the IPP of Project MedeA will be announced, foreseeably, in the middle or end of the second quarter of 2020.