Competitive Dialogue: Driving Innovation Through Procurement?

Public procurement of goods, services and products has become a cornerstone in recent European policies on innovation. With regard to construction, clients are often promoted as change agents that can foster a higher degree of innovation in construction through appropriate design of their procurement procedures. With the new European service procurement directive, a number of changes are underway. Among these are less restrictive procedures for using the more flexible procurement forms like competitive dialogue. Based on a literature review and European statistics, this paper will 1) review the historical changes of European procurement rules, 2)quantify the application of competitive dialogue as procurement procedure, and 3) discuss lessons learned from selected European countrieson promoting and managing change in construction through competitive dialogue. This paper will conclude that competitive dialogue seems to have a low potential as driver of innovation in a quantitative sense due to the stable but small number of applications, while the effects on innovation in a qualitative sense needs to be studied further.