Investigating Co-Creation Practices in Public-Procurement-of-Innovation: A Danish Case

• In Event: Scaling Up Co-creation? The Politics of Participatory Innovation Instruments

Abstract

Public Procurement of Innovation (PPI) is increasingly supported by the EU to boost innovation. PPI can produce new product markets (Edquist, 2018) by enabling the public sector to become early adopters and use its purchasing power to support innovative solutions.
Scholars have previously been analyzing PPI and, for instance, the roles of institutions (Rolfstam, 2009) and the current legal frameworks related to procurement. These studies argue that legal frameworks are not the major obstacle for a broader uptake of PPI in Europe. Instead, future studies should explore how institutional factors “may affect the success or failure of multi-organisational collaborations in public procurement of innovation” (Rolfstam, 2012 p109). Thus, until now, not much focus has been on the actual collaborative processes that are practiced in and across institutional settings in PPI projects in order to support or create new innovative solutions.
To fill this gap, this paper aims to investigate co-creation processes in the public sector in Denmark. We investigate two Danish organizations; Gate21 (non-profit partner-organization) and CLEAN (member-organization) that are both intermediaries between research institutions and public- and private sector in innovation activities and projects. The case study includes participant observation during the PPI projects’ execution as well as qualitative interviews with 15 actors that were/are involved in the PPI activities. Our analysis is inspired the co-creation paradigm, i.e. analyzing how a range of heterogeneous actors find mutually beneficial solutions (Ramaswamy, Pralahad; 2014). By taking this approach, we will investigate how co-creation practices may improve PPI processes.

Authors

• Meiken Hansen, Technical University of Denmark

• Sophie Nyborg, Technical University of Denmark - DTU