نوآوری در تقاضا؛ آیا تأمین تجهیزات عمومی می تواند بازار موفق خلاقیت و نوآوری را به تحرک وادارد؟

Public procurement has been at the centre of recent discussions on innovation policy. We embed it into the broader framework of public policies to stimulate innovation: regulations, R&D subsidies and basic research at universities. We synthesize the characteristics of all four instruments conceptionally and quantitatively compare their effects on innovation success for 1100 firms in Germany. We find that public procurement and knowledge spillovers from universities propel innovation success equally. The benefits of university knowledge apply uniformly to all firms. However, public procurement is especially effective for smaller firms in regions under economic stress and in distributive or technological services.

As innovation is acknowledged to be a key driver of economic growth, governments promote innovation activities both in the public and in the private sector. The promotion of R&D is also an essential element of the Lisbon strategy launched in 2000 and further defined by the Barcelona Research Council in 2002. The objective is to increase investment in R&D to 3% of GDP by 2010 – two-thirds of this increase should be funded by the private sector – so that Europe becomes the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world. There are different instruments available to stimulate innovation activities of the private sector. Public procurement has been revitalized as an innovation policy instrument on both European and national levels. In recent years major initiatives have been launched to foster innovation through public procurement, e.g., the Aho-Report (European Commission, 2006); Barcelona Strategy (European Commission, 2003). Public procurement may have a large potential since it accounts for 16% of combined EU-15 GDP (Georghiou et al., 2003). In Germany public procurement spending is around 260 billion euros a year and thus takes up about 12% of GDP (BMBF, 2006). Public procurement follows multiple objectives with promoting innovation being potentially one of them. Several more dedicated innovation policy instruments exist. Regulations, R&D subsidies and the scientific and technological infrastructure have also been identified as other main types of public innovation policy which are designed to improve industrial innovativeness (Rothwell and Zegveld, 1981 and Geroski, 1990). In this study we explore the specific features of public procurement in innovation policy conceptually and embed public procurement into the broader context of stimulating innovation in enterprises by public policy. More precisely, we identify shared and distinctive features of public procurement compared to other major policy instruments, i.e. co-public funding for private innovation projects, knowledge spillovers from publicly funded universities as well as intervention through regulation. Empirically, we translate this analytical framework into a comparative assessment of how public procurement performs relative to these other policy options. We measure performance in terms of the market success of firms’ innovations. Moreover, we question whether these effects apply uniformly to all firms, independent of their size or the industry and region in which they are operating. Instead we suggest that firms are heterogeneous with regard to whether certain policy instruments are relevant, accessible or useful to them. As a result distinct subpopulations of firms can be identified that respond differently to the policy instruments under investigation. Based on these findings, policy recommendations are derived. In essence, we ask: Is public procurement an effective instrument to provide public support for innovation compared to other options and if so, for which firms does it work? We explore these research questions empirically for a broad sample of more than 1100 firms and their innovation activities. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the literature on public procurement in innovation policy. Section 3 relates it to other important policy instruments and presents previous empirical results. The database and the estimation strategy for the empirical study are described in Section 4. Section 5 presents its results. Finally, we draw conclusions in Section 6.

We conduct this study to analyze the effects of public technology procurement, a recently revitalized innovation policy tool, on firms’ innovation success. We judge the effects of this instrument against other forms of public support, namely regulation, provision of infrastructure via universities and research institutions as well as public R&D subsidies. Our goal is to support policy makers with empirical evidence on two major research questions: Is public procurement an effective instrument to provide public support for innovation compared to other options and if so, for which firms does it work? In a first step we compare the effects of the instruments on innovation success, measured as the share of turnover with market novelties. Then we investigate whether the effects of these forms are specific to certain structural features of firms. We find that public policy leverage points are limited to neither the supply nor the demand side. Public procurement has significant positive effects on innovation success but so does the provision of a knowledge infrastructure in universities spilling over to firms. Both effects have similar impacts on innovation success. In line with previous research the positive effects from public procurement stem from general administrative procurement and not from the needs of the military, police or fire departments. However, the effects of each policy instrument may depend upon firm characteristics. In the second step of the analysis we question whether firms are fully homogeneous in their response to certain forms of public support. Applying latent class tobit models we identify two subgroups of firms which are homogeneous in terms of their structural characteristics such as size, age, location (Eastern Germany) and industry. We discover that firms benefit equally from university knowledge across these firm subgroups. Thus, a policy of trying to generate knowledge spillovers from universities to firms could target all sectors and types of firms. In order to strengthen linkages between firms and universities and research institutions either firms can be encouraged to use universities’ knowledge or universities can be given incentives to diffuse their knowledge and technologies more intensively (technology transfer). We find that public procurement has heterogeneous effects on firm's innovation performance. It is effective in particular for smaller firms in regional areas under economic stress and in distributive and technological services. We suspect that public procurement may be especially promising for firms with limited resources. The fact that orders are typically large and come from reliable public entities provides these firms with the necessary planning reliability to engage in innovation activities which may otherwise be too expensive or risky. Besides, public procurement provides them with immediate sales opportunities, as opposed to support for research, which requires additional investments for exploitation in the future. Our results offer empirical evidence to support Geroski's suggestion “of supporting a wide range of small- and medium-size contractors capable of handling smaller projects” (Geroski, 1990, p. 196). Of course, public tenders must be open to all potential bidders and cannot target or privilege specific firms. Thus, there are limits on how public procurement tenders can be tailored to specific firm characteristics. However, looking at the way public tenders are set up they should lower potential barriers. Making tender offers more transparent and easily accessible can be considered a starting point. Government should also aim at avoiding lengthy or tedious application procedures which may overstretch the available resources of small firms. Our results indicate that public procurement has the greatest immediate impact on innovation outputs if small firms – especially in economically challenged regions – are aware of them and can participate in a way that suits their limited resources. This seems to be especially relevant when it comes to the public procurement of distributive and technological services. However, it should be kept in mind that the four policy instruments are not substitutes or interchangeable measures since they (also) have other objectives, time horizons, resource differences, etc.