Seminar with Charles Edquist

Department of Marketing and C3 –Center for Connected Care–invites to

Seminar with Charles Edquist:
Functional Procurement for Innovation, Welfare and the Environment

Edquist will talk about his recent report for the Swedish Competition Authority, called “Funktionsupphandling för innovation, välfärd och miljö”. The talk will be in English.

See also this page for more details.

Edquist is one of Europe's leading innovation researchers (19 000+ Google citations) with important contributions to the literatures on systems of innovations, the Swedish paradox, and innovation policy. His research on public procurement for innovation is among his most cited contributions.

He was the first director (2004-2011) of CIRCLE--the Centre for Innovation and Competences in the Learning Economy--at Lund University in Sweden, and he held the Rauben Rausing Chair in Innovation Research there.

See also https://charlesedquist.com/about/

Excerpt from the summary of Edquist’s report:

“Most of all procurement is based on documents that contain a description of an existing product that you want to buy. Often this description is quite - or even very - detailed. Such product specification is a serious obstacle to innovations in public procurement. Hence, product procurement can thus generally not lead to innovations.

For several decades, many researchers, policy makers and procurers have used the word ”innovation procurement", probably because they have been interested in achieving innovations as a result of public procurement. Some have argued that we achieve innovations by describing products that do not exist (and which would therefore be innovations if they were developed). However, on reflection, this is an impossibility and the term innovation procurement in the sense of procurement of described innovations is therefore unsuitable. However, one can try to achieve innovations through procurement in other ways than by describing innovations (i.e. products that do not exist). Discussing how this can happen is the main objective of this report”