Links I Liked [Public Procurement]
2. A Spanish vision of public procurement of innovation (Spanish only). Plus, the national Government produced a new version of its innovative public procurement guide, also only in Spanish.
3. The UK Government cannot save £10 billion by moving procurement online. Peter Smith is sanguine about the savings claims included in the Reform report Cloud 9: the future of public procurement. I am not fully convinced either, but it could be added to the report's figure that if competition in public procurement increased by being moved online then the ability of (some) suppliers to extract rent would be limited. This affects not only the prices today (potentially leading to their immediate reduction) but also prices in the future as the increase in competition would lead in my view to a gentler slope of increase going forward.
4. Whitehouse adopts a Open Source Software policy:
"This policy requires that, among other things: (1) new custom code whose development is paid for by the Federal Government be made available for reuse across Federal agencies; and (2) a portion of that new custom code be released to the public as Open Source Software (OSS)."
Very interesting approach by the US Federal Government. I have to wonder however how many Federal agencies will end up reusing custom code contained in the repository. This policy does have implications for procurement.
5. We're hiring: Professors, Associate Professors, Senior Lecturers and Lecturers.