“Promoting Innovation Through Public Procurement: Best Practice & Networking” is the title of the conference that will take place in Brussels on 23-24 March 2010, organized by the Directorate General for Industry and Entrepreneurship.

In the past three years, the European Commission and several public authorities in Europe have launched a number of initiatives that stimulate the public procurement ofinnovations and stimulate innovative public procurement itself. These include Green Public Procurement GPP, e-Procurement, social considerations, variants in procurement, technical dialogue or forward commitment procurement methodologies, as well as Pre Commercial Procurement PCP or research oriented public procurements.

Stakeholder and expert communities, training and guidance are being developed. To start building a European critical mass in this field, there is a need to facilitate the networking and exchanging of best practice among public procurers, policy makers and relevant stakeholders.

The conference aims to promote a connected community of stakeholders and identify possible joint actions. Specific objectives are to:

• Clarify the relationships between networks and stakeholders (existing ones and new ones) that can facilitate/ promote public procurement of innovations: innovation agencies, Enterprise Europe Network partners, experts, industry, procuring facilitators.
• Identify what tools are best used to help these people and where there is potential for joint actions.

Context

Public procurement was identified as a priority for EU innovation policy under the 2006 Broad Based Innovation Strategy. Since then, the Commission has provided guidance on innovation in public procurement, introduced the concept of precommercial and launched calls to support trans-national networks of public procurers in the lead market areas and for pre-commercial procurement. In parallel, innovative approaches in public procurement have been already developed.

Registration for this conference, which will take place al Centre Albert Borschette (Rue Froissart 36, 1040 Brussels) is open until 25 January 2010 in the following email address: filomena.russo@ec.europa.eu. Draft agenda for this evet is available at the website of the DG Industry.