Public Procurement of Innovation (PPI) is a crucial challenge for public bodies to be implemented during next years. The “usual” way of purchasing goods is based solely on the price of the product. Life cycle costing, supply chain analysis or group purchase are rarely used, which means missing some opportunities to get innovative products that would give purchasers competitive advantage. Therefore, there is an urgent need to start developing networks of procurers. Such networks will enable them to identify common needs, conduct market analysis, understand supply chain, use these tools to comprise a higher procurement volume, and achieve bigger impact on suppliers. It will allow them voice out their unmet needs, create a new demand to access sustainable products of higher quality, and develop new applications with lower life cycle costs. This can be obtained through PPI. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has equally become an essential tool used in nearly all areas of society. Health sector, which is the core of this proposal, is no exception to this regard. The target of the project is to understand health care public procurers unmet needs, particularly in eHealth. That is why a network of procurers will be developed within the scope of the project. The network will allow the consortium to identify common needs, explore the best available solutions and stimulate the market with the aim of creating a PPI/PCP procurement strategy for the eHealth sector. In order for the EPP-eHealth consortium to be able to achieve the mentioned objectives, a set of 4 workshops aimed at project members and potential stakeholders will be developed. Three of these workshops will train attendees in public procurement while a 4th workshop will be used as a market test. Finally and aiming to widespread project results, a comprehensive set of dissemination activities will be carried out.

The main objective of PROSO is to foster societal engagement under the terms of RRI in the research and innovation systems in Europe through generation of a policy guide for developing governance for the advancement of societal engagement under RRI in relation to three fields of R&I. The policy guide will be based on the results that PROSO will achieve through an analysis of barriers and incentives for engaging Third sector actors and citizens under the terms of RRI in relation to publicly funded research including public-private partnership research initiatives. This analysis will be carried out across three R&I domains (nanotechnology; food & health; bio-economy) focusing on selected cases of R&I situations in each domain and be based on an investigation of the points of view of Third sector actors and citizens and of other stakeholders/actors contributing significantly to RRI including science/technology policy makers, research funders, academics, and industry/businesses. Main methods used will be semi-structured interviews with the major actors contributing to RRI; national citizen panels that will be carried out in five European countries; an European multi-actor deliberation event on promising approaches to encourage and implement societal engagement under the terms of RRI; and a couple of expert/stakeholder workshops on selected topics.