INNOVATION PROCUREMENT: AN ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION TOWARDS AN INNOVATIVE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM

The need for better educational systems is, nowadays, an undeniable issue. Within the European Union, education is seen as the basis for cultivating a fairer, more inclusive, resilient and innovative Europe. Based on these premises, strategic frameworks (first at ET2010, and then ET2020) addressed to the EU countries have been settled up, defining common strategic objectives and directions to guide and support EU members in overcoming the several challenges of the Education and Training system face. Despite the existing positive signs of progress, the studies show that further improvements are necessary to meet the targets defined by the European Commission.

Innovative forms of public procurement may have an important role in supporting society to achieve such an improvement. In this paper, we will explore the approach and work pursued by Learning Technology Accelerator (LEA) project — a CSA project funded by EU H2020 programme — and debate how the public procurement may help the education system to achieve better results, aiming to contribute to the awareness on these instruments by all the stakeholders involved in the educational system. Unlike the traditional procurement (in which the procurer/buyer buys a ready product available in the market), the innovation procurement gives a more active role to the buyers by allowing them to be involved in the product/solution development and, in consequence, influencing its final result. This means the ability to buy a product/ solution adjusted to the needs of schools, teachers and students when the market does not have a product answering the identified needs.

Despite their advantages, innovation procurement instruments lack larger use in the education sector. The lack of knowledge and expertise on innovation procurement, the prioritization of short-term solutions and the mismatch of public policies and strategies are some of the common barriers to the innovation procurement use. Moreover, as stated by Ellinor Wallin (LEA team member), 2018, “traditional education systems are closed and not open to innovation”. In this paper, we will illustrate how the education sector may benefit from these innovation procurement instruments (specifically, Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) and the complementary Public Procurement of Innovation (PPI)), providing an overview and the main advantages of implementing each of these processes as well as some good practices to manage and optimising them.