Quantifying the impact of Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) in Europe based on evidence from the ICT sector : executive summary

Pre-commercial procurement (PCP) is a competitive multiple-sourcing procedure for procuring research and development services. It involves different suppliers competing in parallel through different phases of development. The risks and benefits are shared between the procurers and the suppliers under market conditions. The PCP is complementary to Public Procurement of Innovative Solutions (PPI) that refers to a public procurement in which procurers act as early adopters of innovative solutions that are new arrivals on the market, but not yet available on a large-scale commercial basis. The objective of this study is to quantify the economic impact of PCP using a sample of PCP and non-PCP cases implemented in Europe. In particular, the study aims to estimate the impacts of PCP on the following aspects, which constitute our nine research questions (see also page 8): 1) Improvements in the quality and/or efficiency of the public services achieved by deploying the innovative solutions developed as a result of the PCP; 2) Increase in quality and decrease in prices of products resulting from the highly competitive multi-sourcing, phased procurement approach that distinguishes PCP from other procurement approaches; 3) Reduction in the risk of failure in large scale follow-up PPI procurements 4) Increase in the efficiency of R&D expenditures; 5) Speeding up time-to-market for firms and facilitating the access of SMEs to the procurement market; 6) Attracting financial investors to Europe; 7) Increased interoperability / impact on standardization / reduction of supplier lock-in; 8) Impacts on competition structure in the market; 9) Increased exploitation of IPRs and R&D results (IPR protected or not) in general.