Demand-led innovation for civil security through Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP)

Expected Outcome:Projects’ results are expected to contribute to the following outcomes:

• A community of EU civil security practitioners with shared needs for innovative technology solutions, supported by an industrial base in particular SMEs and Startups, to access the public procurement market and scale up their business;
• Procurers facilitate the commercialisation of innovative solutions by their successful suppliers through providing them with first customer references for the validation and first pilot deployment;
• Increased opportunities for wide market uptake and economies of scale for the supply side through increased demand for innovative solutions, wide publication of results and where relevant contribution to standardisation, regulation or certification;
• Supporting public procurers, to collectively implement PCPs to drive innovation from the demand side and open up wider commercialisation opportunities for companies in Europe to take or maintain international leadership in new markets that can deliver innovative solutions.

Scope:As past experience shows that pre-commercial procurement opens up the procurement market for startups and enables the public sector to address societal challenges more effectively, public procurers should make more strategic use of PCP. Applicants are invited to submit proposals for PCP action to acquire Research and Development (R&D) services and innovative civil security technology solutions.

Proposals should demonstrate interest from a broader community of potential buyers, beyond the direct beneficiaries, who share similar needs and are open to jointly adopting the solutions developed, provided they are proven mature and operationally viable. The proposals must include an analysis of the state of the art and market landscape, aligning research activities with identified needs and presenting a range of technical alternatives to address the challenge. Furthermore, to stimulate dialogue with the supply side, public procurers are required to organise proposals should demonstrate sustainability of the action beyond the life of the project.

The proposals should build on the outcomes of CSA projects funded under previous work programmes aimed at creating Stronger grounds for pre-commercial procurement of innovative security technologies. The proposals should provide clear evidence to justify and de-risk the PCP action, demonstrating that the identified challenge is significant and necessitates a PCP action to mature certain technologies and compare alternatives. It must be shown that a consolidated group of practitioners and procurers with shared needs and requirements is committed to the PCP process, enabling informed decisions on future joint procurement of innovative solutions. Activities covered should include cooperation with policy makers to reinforce the national policy frameworks and mobilise substantial additional national budgets for PCP and innovation procurement in general beyond the scope of the project. The tendering process must be well-defined, supported by a draft plan, and include readiness of documentation and administrative procedures to ensure a compliant launch of the call for R&D services under PCP rules.

Proposals must demonstrate commitment to exploiting project results beyond its conclusion, ensuring engagement with stakeholders and implementation of strategies for future uptake. Applicants should also clarify measures to ensure compliance with the principles of the EU Directive on public procurement, particularly those related to PCP. The required open market consultations should be completed in at least three EU Member States. Prior consultations conducted under previous CSA projects may be used, provided they ensured procurement viability and remain relevant to the current state of the art.

Involvement of procurement decision makers is needed to ensure that end solution(s) are adopted by public buyers, increasing the societal impact of the related research activities. Therefore, procurers should declare in the proposal their interest to pursue deployment of solutions resulting from the PCP in case the PCP delivers successful solutions and indicate whether they will:

• procure successful solution(s) as part of the PCP.
• launch a separate follow-up procurement after the PCP to buy such type of solutions.
• adopt successful solutions without the need to procure them (e.g. in case of open-source solutions).
• foresee financial or regulatory incentives for others to adopt successful solutions (e.g. in case the final end-users of the solutions are not the procurers but for example citizens).

In these four cases, the procurers can implement the project as a fast-track PCP[1]. In the first case, the procurers must foresee the budget in the proposal to purchase at least one solution during the PCP. In the second case, the procurers should include in the proposal a deliverable that prepares the follow-up procurement to purchase such type of solution(s) after the PCP. In the first and third case, the procurers must foresee sufficient time during the project to deploy and validate that the solutions function well after installation. In the fourth case, the procurers can use financial support to third parties to provide financial incentives to final end-users to adopt the solutions, with a maximum budget of EUR 100.000.

Applicants should propose an implementation of the project that includes:

• A minimal preparation stage dedicated to finalising the tendering documents package for a PCP call for tenders based on the technical input, and to define clear verification and validation procedures, methods and tools for the evaluation of the prototypes to be developed throughout the PCP phases.
• Moreover, to ensure the sustainability and uptake of the developed solutions, proposals should outline clear plans for post-PCP activities. As outlined in the general annexes of the Horizon Europe Work Programme, the topic allows public buyers to use the fast-track PCP option (e.g. 2 instead of 3 phases) when they commit to buying or deploying the resulting solutions after the PCP. However, if such a commitment is not yet in place at the proposal stage, the call requires proposers to include a deliverable outlining concrete activities to prepare the ground for follow-up deployment or procurement after the PCP.
• Launching the call for tenders for research and development services. The call for tenders should envisage a competitive development composed of different phases that would lead to at least 2 prototypes from 2 different providers to be validated in real operational environment at the end of the PCP cycle;
• Conducting the competitive development of the prototypes following the PCP principles including a design phase, an integration and technical verification phase and a validation in real operational environment phase. In evaluating the proposals and the results of the PCP phases, the applicants should consider technical merit, feasibility and commercial potential of proposed research efforts.
• Consolidating the results of the evaluation of the developed prototypes, extracting conclusions and recommendations from the validation process, and defining a strategy for a potential uptake of solutions inspired in the PCP outcomes, including a complete technical specification of the envisaged solutions and standardisation needs and/or proposals. This strategy should consider joint-cross border procurement schemes and exploit synergies with other EU and national non-research funds.

The applicants are expected to maximise the visibility of the project outcomes to the wide community of potential EU public buyers. Liaison with other civil security communities beyond those addressed by the project is encouraged in order to assess the possible reuse and extensibility of the identified solutions to different domains.

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content should be addressed only if relevant in relation to the objectives of the research effort.

[1] see General Annex H of the Horizon Europe Work Programme.