The conference
At the end of the month in Berlin, the 5th annual conference about innovation in Public Procurement will be held. You can access here the detailed programme of the conference and you will find below the rational for such event:
Innovation is needed if the EU is to meet its targets for competitiveness and growth. Public procurement of innovation offers untapped potential. Equally as important is the possibility to reform public procurement processes and make them leaner, simpler and more user-friendly. New public procurement directives provides the opportunity to rethink the way public procurement works in EU and make it more efficient and effective.
It also pushes for innovative procedures and tools. For example, joint public procurement or the use of the European Single Procurement Document. This means lower costs for both public buyers and suppliers, and new opportunities for European enterprises through easier access to public procurement procedures at national and EU level.
The Opportunity
More than the conference itself – you can see the program in attachment – what strikes me most is the enormous and unique untapped potential Public organisation are standing on, especially because they are not competing against each other. I’m not thinking about purchasing power, more than for the cases it would equalised an unbalanced relationship between buyer and seller. No, I am thinking about the fabulous value that digital platforms could add to those procurement organisations, so much fragmented across countries, cities and functions (health, transport, governance…), by enabling an EU-wide network-collaboration, with thousands of users, so far impossible. Let’s list some example:
- Automation: Automated and real-time translation across nations;
- Digital: Standardisation and simplification of products, services and processes
- Mobility : Shared Services although not centralised,
- Cloud : Shared technology
- Analytics : Increasing EU market visibility per category : specifications, players, price, risk, buying patterns
- Data : gathering flows of information and enabling data-mining to identify optimisation opportunities
I’m a strong believer that Digital Platforms similar to Facebook or LinkedIn will arise first in such sectors where:
- there is no or little direct competition between players: Hospitality, Governmental institution,
- there is a multi-layers multi-players structure such as in CPG, Shipping or Air Transportation for example.