Rethinking public procurement: toward a mission-oriented framework

Public procurement is a key tool for mission-oriented innovation policies. It has been relevant in industrial policy history, but underused as a tool for shaping markets to tackle social and ecological challenges. This paper argues for a new framework to understand and guide public procurement as a strategic tool to shape markets toward public value: mission-oriented public procurement. Current procurement paradigms—public procurement for innovation and sustainable public procurement—provide frameworks that are limited by their economic underpinnings leading them to consider value as a secondary goal, to lack strategic coherence and to usually rely on static quantitative evaluations. A bold new framework of procurement incorporates value as directional rather than diffuse, assessed dynamically (over time) rather than statically (at a point in time), and co-created rather than individually created, all of which results in a risk-taking public sector rather than the private sector alone taking risks. This change could support policymakers and public buyers renewing their policies and practices to explore the potential of public procurement to catalyze innovation and investment aligned with tackling social and ecological challenges.