Innovation procurement involves 3 stages and several steps per stage:
1. Preparatory stage (before procurement), covering the following steps:
- identification and assessment of the needs of the procurer (and end-users);
- verification of the needs against what already exists (prior art analysis & patent search);
- verification of the needs against what the market can deliver (open market consultation);
- formulation of the business-case for the procurer to start an innovation procurement (how to set the functionality/price requirements on the innovative solutions so the procurement achieves a positive cost/benefit outcome for the procurer);
- drafting the tender documents (including setting IPR, confidentiality and standardisation requirements).
2. Tendering stage (procurement), covering the following steps:
- conducting the tender procedure (publication of tender documentation, tendering, evaluation of offers, awarding the contract);
- in case of PPI, conformance testing [1] may take place before or during the tendering stage.
3. Contract implementation stage (after procurement), covering the following steps:
- continuous monitoring and assessing the final results of the R&D (PCP) or deployment (PPI), payment of supplier(s);
- in case of PCP, this is repeated for every PCP phase and is followed by a selection of the R&D providers that continue to the next R&D Phase.
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[1] Conformance testing is only optional and happens before contract award, so before contract implementation stage. The purpose of conformance testing is to test whether solutions of potential suppliers are compliant with minimum requirements that need to be met for offers to be eligible (e.g. conformance with standards, certification requirements) so this needs to be done before contract award.