Promoting Innovation through Public Procurement: Best practice & networking

Conference announcement: "Promoting Innovation through Public Procurement: Best practice & networking", Brussels, 23-24 March 2010

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 of innovations and stimulate innovative public procurement itself. These include transnational networks of innovative procurers under the Lead Market Initiative and for Pre Commercial Procurement, best practice documents on innovative procurement, as well as activities on Green Public Procurement (GPP), eProcurement, social considerations, variants in procurement, technical dialogue or forward commitment procurement methodologies, and risk management in procurement. Stakeholder and expert communities, training and guidance are being developed. To start building a European critical mass in the field of Public Procurement of Innovation, there is a need to facilitate the networking and exchanging of best practice among public procurers and relevant stakeholders. This conference aims to promote a connected community of stakeholders and identify possible joint actions. More specifically, its objectives are: 1. To strengthen 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; 2. To identify what tools are best used to help these people and where there is potential for joint actions. Public procurers, policy makers and other key stakeholders for implementing innovative procurement are warmly invited to this conference. The event is free and places will be allocated based on registrations received with priority given to public procurers and policy makers. A draft agenda is attached. People that are interested in participating in the conference are kindly requested to express their interest to filomena.russo@ec.europa.eu before 26 February 2010. For other queries about the event please contact lieve.bos@ec.europa.eu and bertrand.wert@ec.europa.eu