Pre-commercial Public Procurement for ITS innovation & deployment

 For several years, the European Commission has dedicated specific working programme topics to cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) and Services to help advance technical research in this area.  The results of these research programmes are expected to contribute to the shaping of European, national and regional public policy frameworks.

Public Authorities play a major role in making a success of cooperative ITS.  In order to ensure a wide European deployment of cooperative ITS, Public Authorities should establish national cooperative infrastructure (road side equipment) that ensures cross-border interoperability and cross-brand interoperability of systems.

Pre-commercial public procurement represents an existing, but underutilised opportunity  for Member States to drive innovation in this sector. Pre-commercial procurement will not only be a major tool to boost innovation, it is also considered to be an important tool to improve the conditions to move from the current Research & Development  stage towards a large scale market of ITS services.   

In this context, the P3ITS project will investigate specifically how the existing but underutilised opportunity of pre-commercial procurement can, while respecting existing legislation, stimulate innovation and help advance towards market conditions for large scale introduction of cooperative ITS services. P3ITS will establish a European network of 13 procurement experts, professionals from the ITS sector and industry and public procurement agencies.

Objectives

The P3ITS project will start a dialogue between procurement experts, experts and industry professionals from the ITS sector and procurement agencies, with the aim of building a network of procurers and industry experts as consultation partners.

Due to the complexity of the topic, the project will address more or less ‘isolated’ problem definitions:

• P3ITS will first focus on the needs and requirements for the innovation and migration from RTD toward large scale market of cooperative ITS services.  
• Secondly, P3ITS will focus on the options and mechanisms that pre-commercial public procurement - as a special structure for procurement -   provides for risk sharing and stimulating innovation.
• Following the identification of requirements from industry and analysis of mechanisms for pre-commercial public procurement (PCP), the project will consolidate the results and extend the individual conclusions.

Duration & funding

From 1st January 2010 to 30th June 2011, Funding through the European Commission 7th Framework Programme.