European Joint Cross-border Procurement and Innovation

Arguably, European integration in the procurement sector is still a challenge. More than forty years of Procurement Directives have not yet succeeded in opening the internal procurement market. Many of the reasons are wellknown: the initially limited scope of the Directives, and the varied implementations in different national procurement systems, which raise legal barriers and exacerbate language barriers. Integrity issues must also be addressed. All these factors help explain the reluctance of suppliers to cross the national borders, and buyers’ inclination to maintain their nationally based supply chains. The Directives seem to have done better at opening national markets compared to even more fragmented markets at regional and local levels. The development of electronic means for a fully digital transition has also logged behind. Nonetheless, significant changes are coming rapidly and the developments across the Atlantic make the trajectory of those changes clearer. Technologies and joint procurement have radically changed the procurement sector as we know it. The burdens of a traditional paper based award of a single contract for a single procuring entity seem to be rapidly receding.