In January 2025, a new article was published under the title “Functional Public Procurement and Innovation – A Conceptual Framework”. The authors are Charles Edquist and Geo Quinot. The article can be downloaded here.

The abstract of the article is as follows:

Abstract The literature on the relationship between public procurement and innovation has been growing rapidly during the last couple of decades. However, there are still conceptual problems and ambiguities. This contribution puts forward a conceptual framework to sort out and specify notions such as “innovation”, “public procurement”, “product procurement”, “functional procurement” and “innovation partnerships”—as well as the relations between them. In developing this conceptual framework, we argue that the distinction between product specifications and functional specifications is a useful dichotomy when discussions of the relations between public procurement and innovation are pursued and when public procurement is carried out in practice. It can be instrumental in transforming procurement that prevents innovations into procurement that enhances innovations. The development of this dichotomy means that we have changed the conceptual framework needed to understand and explain the relationships between (different kinds of) public procurement on one hand and innovation on the other hand. We note that functional procurement is allowed under the EU procurement directives (and by implication the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement) as well as the UNCITRAL Model Law on Public Procurement. In fact, the EU directives strongly encourage functional procurement, stating that it “should be used as widely as possible”. Additionally, the EU directives on procurement introduced “Innovation partnership” as a new procurement procedure. It is intended to also address research and development results and innovations as outcomes of public procurement processes. However, this procedure has not been used very much. One reason is that the directive needs a much higher specificity to become operatively useful. This procedure should also be related to functional public procurement.