Fostering Innovation in Public Procurement through Public Private Partnerships

The prevailing view in the studies on Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) is that PPPs can improve the quality and efficiency of infrastructure services and facilitates innovation in infrastructure developments. Although researchers highlight the potentiality of PPP models for stimulating innovation, they do not prove whether and in which conditions the PPP model is capable of developing innovative solutions. This paper aims at providing answers to the following key research questions: Which are the PPP features that favor innovation? How properly structure a PPP in order to foster innovation? With this aim, drawing upon the main streams of studies on innovation, we develop a conceptual framework that identifies the PPP features that can influence the innovativeness. Second, we define how these PPP features have to be structured in order to foster innovation.