How European hospitals can buy something that does not exist yet

A hospital that wants a solution nobody sells yet is in an awkward position. Standard procurement compares offers for an existing product; there is no catalogue entry for something that still needs development, and a procurement team that improvises around that creates legal risk for itself. European procurement law recognises this and provides dedicated routes. They are genuinely used - and they are also genuinely demanding, which is why innovative suppliers and public buyers so often fail to meet each other. The point of this page is to make the map legible from both sides.

Market consultation fails for a predictable reason: suppliers do not want to reveal what they can do in an open room, and buyers do not want to look as though they have pre-selected somebody. Both are reasonable fears, and between them they produce consultations where nothing useful is said. One answer used in the Netherlands is a two-stage model with an independent facilitator - a trust agent, who is not working on behalf of the buyer. A closed brainstorming session with market frontrunners comes first, then the open market dialogue, with rules of engagement agreed on both sides. The facilitator's independence is the whole mechanism, and it is protected by who they are and how they are funded, not by good intentions.

All of this rests on European directives, but procurement happens under national law, and the differences are not cosmetic. The underlying analysis covers Germany, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Italy - each with its own statutory basis for innovation procurement, its own procedure names, its own thresholds and its own national initiatives promoting the practice. Spain, for example, gives innovation partnerships an explicit statutory footing and reinforces innovation procurement through its science and technology legislation. The United Kingdom runs innovation procurement under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 alongside the Procurement Act 2023, which modernised the regime with simplified rules and a central digital platform. Each of these six countries has its own statutory basis, its own procedure names and its own thresholds, and none of it transfers automatically from one to the next.