Public Procurement

How much has the innovation partnership been used?

Pedro Telles

Jul 4, 2023 — 1 min read

The European Commission has just published a study on the use of the innovation partnership with TED data for the 2016-2022 period and frankly the data shows in a bit more detail what I already knew from preparing a couple of recent conference presentations.

In that period 172 innovation partnership contracts have been awarded with a total value of around €8B. I would caution into reading too much into the total number of contracts per se, since as it is well known very often contract award notices are not sent to TED at all. Yet, a maximum of 38contracts/year is not really anything worth bragging about.

More relevant I think is the reference that only 18 out of 30 countries (EU+EEA) have used the innovation partnership at all. The 'heavy users' are Finland (25), France (22) and Germany (22). It really shows how the procedure has not taken off and that - in my view correctly - contracting authorities do not see it as particularly useful. This is compounded by the progressive reduction in amount spent from a peak of €659M in 2020 to just €137M 2022, with a clear downwards trend from 2017 onwards.

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On case C-652/22 Kolin Inşaat Turizm Sanayi ve Ticaret

All steam ahead with the revision of the procurement Directives

The Portuguese Audit Court finds systemic abuse of direct awards

The Public Procurement Data Space is upon us