Essential resources like telecommunications, electricity, water and gas that are taken for granted in 21st-century Europe are provided by utilities. In order to provide these life-goods continuously, utilities must innovate relentlessly.
However, in order to innovate, utilities must follow strict procurement procedures that have their origin in public procurement provisions.
At the same time new procurement models, for example electronic procurement and electronic auctions, are introducing a further complexity parameter into the already complex procurement environment.
In addition utilities must innovate not only to meet demand for better services but also increasingly to protect their infrastructure from malign attacks that become more and more frequent due to the omnipresence of information technology. There are two challenges: (i) how to make public procurement procedures more innovation friendly and (ii) how to protect utilities from modern technology attacks against their infrastructure. The combination of these two important points gave birth to the INNO-UTILITIES project.
The project is focused on telecommunications utilities, which are on the forefront of both challenges.
However, other utilities can benefit from the project results as well.
A book was published that summarises part of the work executed in the frame of a joint collaborative project, co-funded by the European Commission under the 5th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development, and specifically by the Programme for Innovation and SMEs. This project started with the objective, among others, to study the procurement frameworks and procedures that are used by telecom operators in order to carry out innovative projects, and to develop recommendations on how the rest of the utilities can make their procurement procedures more innovation-friendly, benefiting from the experience gained by the telecommunications sector. This project is titled “Innovation-friendly Public Procurement & Fight Against Telecommunications Fraud and Security Threads” – or INNO-UTILITIES for short. The overall volume of work was in the order of 150 person months, whereas about 40 person months were invested in the study of the innovative procurement and the development of above-mentioned recommendations. The project was executed jointly by Eurescom GmbH, Portugal Telecom, Virtual Trip Ltd., INA Telecom, Lund University, and University of Patras. In addition opinions were capture via interviews with experts from telecommunications sector related associations, such as ETNO (European Telecommunications Network Operators Association), FIINA (Forum for International Irregular Network Access) and HFF (Hellenic Fraud Forum).
Download the book: Procurement as an Innovation Instrument, by Anastasius Gavras, Leif Hommen, Max Rolfstam, Michalis Mavis, Nikolaos Vasileiadis, Luis Sousa Cardoso Dimitrios Trigos, Dimitrios Serpanos