ابزارهای سیاست برای تأمین تجهیزات عمومی نوآوری: انتخاب، طراحی و ارزیابی

Public procurement is increasingly seen as an important potential instrument of innovation policy. However, policy design has been underpinned largely by anecdotal evidence and without a clear theoretical or empirical basis for understanding how supplying to the public sector actually influences a firm's innovation capabilities and performance and in what ways desirable behaviour and outcomes can be promoted. This paper seeks to address the basis of innovation procurement policy. It establishes a broad taxonomy of procurement policies and instruments that have emerged in OECD countries in response to perceived deficiencies and then compares these with the perceptions of firms using an analysis of a dedicated survey of 800 public sector suppliers in the UK. It is observed that policy measures include the creation of framework conditions, establishing organisational frameworks and developing capabilities, identifying, specifying and signalling needs, and incentivising innovative solutions. The survey findings confirm that the barriers encountered by firms correspond to the deficiencies addressed by policies but do not address them sufficiently. This arises from lack of coverage, lack of ownership by purchasers, failure to address the whole cycle of acquisition and to address risk aversion. The scope of policy measures needs to be extended in time, breadth of reach and depth.

Public procurement accounts for a significant proportion of overall demand for goods and services and is increasingly seen as an attractive and feasible instrument for furthering the goals of innovation policy [1]. While the interest in the use of procurement as an industrial and technology policy instrument or tool is not new [see [2] and [3]] there has been a renewed focus on this underexploited ‘demand side’ approach in recent years [4] and [5]. Policy aspirations in relation to the use of public procurement in support of innovation have been backed by the recommendations of a number of inquiries, reports and policy documents, both at EU [e.g. [6], [7] and [8]] and at national levels [e.g. [9]], most notably in the UK [e.g. [10] and [11]]. Some of those exclusively targeted public procurement to push innovation [6], [8] and [9], while others had a broader remit and situated public procurement within the overall policy toolbox, often as cornerstone of Lead Market Strategies [12], [13] and [14]. However, despite this policy interest, there is little empirical evidence on the implementation of such policy aspirations and on whether policy measures reflect the principal difficulties faced by firms seeking to innovate in the context of the procurement process. Moreover, the use of public procurement as an instrument of innovation policy has posed fresh challenges to policymakers. Most had their experiences founded in a universe of supply-side policies which typically sought to address deficiencies in the resources or capabilities available to potential innovating firms. Resource issues remain the dominant mode, focussed heavily on the upstream part of the innovation process and in particular upon the supply of knowledge. More traditional policies then give grants, soft loans or fiscal incentives to firms to develop new technologies underpinned by Arrow/Nelson market failure arguments about social returns exceeding private returns. Grants at least may also address information failures and issues of uncertainty by encouraging firms to pursue longer term R&D or specific new technologies that they might be averse to exploring with their own resources. On top of this, the same instruments can be used to promote behavioural changes by incentivising collaboration with knowledge producing organisations or with other firms. For smaller firms, where capability gaps may be greater, perceived behavioural deficiencies are also addressed by measures designed to improve their capabilities in management of innovation. With the advent of open innovation policies to improve the supply of knowledge by making intellectual property or public data more available are becoming increasingly common. Taking this whole package together, what can be said is that almost the whole edifice of innovation policy has been built upon enhancing the supply of knowledge to the firm in one way or another. Not surprisingly, this has meant that innovation policy is often treated as a branch of technology policy and in governance terms generally rests with ministries and agencies responsible for R&D policy. As we shall discuss later, this may have influenced the selection and prioritisation of policies. While today it is widely understood that innovation is an interactive rather than a linear process and that both technology (or knowledge) push and market pull have a role, the predominance or traditional market failure rationales rooted in neoclassical economics have dissuaded governments from intervening in so-called near-market stages where customers interact with suppliers. There are of course attractive arguments for this position — in a static situation customers should be best aware of their needs and competition to satisfy those needs should drive towards the best solution. System failure rationales have been less inhibited in relation to which parts of the innovation process they act upon but at their essence is an emphasis upon linkages and institutions and hence a focus on policies to improve networking and information flows. Both sets of rationales can be marshalled in support of the use of procurement for innovation [see [4]] but in their current articulations they do not offer explicit guidance for the design and selection of demand-side policies and in particular procurement-related interventions. As we will see remedying gaps in resources and capabilities remain an important part of the picture. But the crux of demand side interventions is, first, to increase the incentives for firms to innovate, that is to make the return to the innovating organisation sufficiently large or more certain such that it is motivated to supply the innovation; and second, to make buyers more willing and able to demand and absorb innovation. To deconstruct demand-side policies we first need to understand what is going on in public procurement. While this area has increased in profile in policy debates for good reasons and is the most prominent of demand-side measures [5] and [15], the impression is that policy measures at present lack a systematic basis for their design. It is therefore important at this stage to make sense of the variety of approaches already adopted and to relate them to a framework that goes beyond the merely simplistic. In so doing we will also argue that success in innovation procurement requires a shared vision of the future between purchasers and suppliers and that systematic ways of identifying and characterising those possible futures are an important means to achieve this. This article investigates the range of policy interventions to support the use of procurement for innovation and assesses the degree to which they correspond to corrections of identified deficiencies in the process. We do this from two directions. In the first part of the paper we review the policy framework logic for current policy (Section 2.1) and the current policy measures as well as the deficiencies they are intended to remedy (Section 2.2). By doing so we develop a taxonomy of innovation procurement policy. In the second part we test the current assumptions about these deficiencies by analysing relevant aspects of 800 responses to a survey of firms supplying the UK government (Section 3). In the third part, we then compare the two to draw conclusions on whether the design and balance of measures is appropriate to support the development of this approach as integral part of a modern innovation policy (Section 4).

While public procurement is increasingly seen as an important potential instrument of innovation policy, evidence of its effectiveness is largely anecdotal. This paper first provided a taxonomy of procurement policies and instruments. It then reviewed a range of policy instruments according to the failures they address and compared these with the actual perceptions of suppliers to the public sector. The latter drew upon a dedicated survey of 800 suppliers (private and third sector) to the UK public sector. As noted above policy instruments appear to be targeted towards the main deficiencies experienced by firms. The question which then follows is why in the face of these policy interventions, firms appear still to encounter the difficulties that the interventions aim to address? To conclude the paper we offer a series of propositions and observations that may explain the persistence of the deficiencies: i. The presence of policies does not mean that they are consistently available. Examples are scattered in different countries, and many remain, if not at the proposal stage, experiments or pilots with limited coverage, roll out or budgets; ii. Policies are not always well rooted in governance terms. They are often owned by ministries or agencies responsible for innovation policy while successful implementation depends on budget holders in health, transport etc. and often may be at sub-national level. These actors do not necessarily have the same commitment or understanding of innovation, which creates a much bigger challenge to secure the diffusion of the policy. iii. A further concern is that, despite the benefits that success would yield, austerity budgets and cutbacks in government have halted some measures (for example innovation procurement plans in the UK). There is also discussion in some quarters of turning back the clock to favour national suppliers over innovative ones; iv. Policy instruments mainly address the act of procurement itself and do not engage with the whole cycle from identification of need to adoption and diffusion of the innovation, even though many barriers exist at those stage and generally involve a wider set of actors and stakeholders; v. Although some measures exist to mitigate risk, none address it as a broader cultural problem within the public sector or seek to change wider governance such as audit frameworks to achieve a shift in the risk/reward ratios. To harness the huge power of procurement budgets in the direction of innovation thus requires a systemic approach to policy and its implementation. Three key dimensions need to be addressed, cutting across the policy taxonomy. These extend the scope of policy to be longer, wider and deeper: ■ Extension of the timeframe so that the whole cycle of need and its satisfaction is addressed, also ensuring that a future vision is built-in; ■ Extension of the breadth of reach of policy to include all stakeholders and to overcome deficiencies in the understanding of innovation among purchasing ministries and agencies on the one hand and the understanding of procurement and its relation to innovation in those normally dealing with supply-side innovation policies on the other hand; ■ Deepening the measures to address the underlying cultural practices of the public sector, particularly in relation to risk management. A first step in extending the timeframe is to enhance communication between all actors in the wider lifecycle of purchasing and enhancing in the context of a forward-looking vision which brings together anticipated needs and a wide range of potential solutions. As remarked earlier this is the natural territory of foresight approaches, including road-mapping. However, those foresight approaches will need to adapt to the procurement environment and be designed to avoid capture by the advocates of particular solutions. They will also need to engage end users beyond the initial purchasers to ensure that the innovators are given robust feedback at the earliest possible stage. The payoff will be to improve the diffusion environment as well as that for innovation, a critical factor in the public sector where decisions are not wholly market driven. To make purchasing ministries take ownership of innovation procurement measures may require not only education but also a fundamental change in their mission so that promotion of innovation becomes an additional objective for all of them across government [45]. The problem of risk aversion and culture is probably the least tractable as the remedy is unlikely to reside only within the domain of procurement or even of innovation. To avoid labelling such issues with a mystique that leaves them in the domain of the insoluble it is important to unpack them and to address directly the factors which drive them. Solutions may include specialised intermediaries who support buying organisations in complex procurement activities and by doing so build up capacity and risk management practices across the public sector. Ultimately support and training would have to be underpinned by changes in individual incentives and rewards and a programme of rigorous evaluation designed to test (and hopefully prove) the proposition that the present practice of highlighting only failures when risks are taken fails to capture the whole picture in which productivity and service gains through innovation in the public sector increase societal welfare.