Estonia

Public Procurement, Innovation and “No Policy” Policy
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Abstract

Estonian innovation policy has been developing rapidly since the mid-2000s, but supply-side measures dominate, and systemic public procurement of innovation exists only in some unimplemented policy documents—a situation dominated by noninterventionist neo-liberal values and inertia in the politico-administrative systems, described as a “no policy” policy. Nevertheless, public procurement has been successfully applied in the ICT domain and has achieved moderate success in defence. In order to support modernisation of the private sector, a more generic policy targeting innovation in public procurements has gained interest. Several important challenges remain, including changing the dominant culture of the public-procurement community, which avoids risk-taking and exhibits weak administrative capacities. We propose applying public procurement of innovation to selected sectors. The Estonian case study offers an unique opportunity to understand the potential of and possible barriers to encouraging more comprehensive public procurement of innovation policies within a liberal catching-up context.

Keywords

Foreign Direct Investment World Trade Organization Innovation Policy Public Procurement Policy Domain 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Ragnar Nurkse School of Innovation and GovernanceTallinn University of TechnologyTallinnEstonia

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