Quantifying public procurement of R&D of ICT solutions in Europe : final report

The European Commission is promoting forward-looking public procurement strategies in several flagship initiatives in the Europe 2020 strategy. For instance, by acting as technologically demanding first buyers, public procurers can drive R&D and innovation from the demand side. Developing effective policy initiatives in this area requires a systematic monitoring of R&D procurement expenditure in Member States across various sectors of public interest and across expenditure categories, such as ICT. However, there is today no systemic unified mechanism to track the total amount of R&D procured by public entities in Europe, and even less information is available about the share of ICT-related R&D procurement. Against this background, the present study has undertaken a first large scale data gathering exercise on this expenditure and, based on this experience, it provides guidelines to collect the same data in the future and integrate this exercise into the official yearly statistics relating to R&D expenditure. The study was launched in early January 2012 and finalised in March 2014.