More than 35 legal and Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) experts gathered at ITS Netherlands in Delft to discuss the legal aspects of Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) applied for ITS. The discussion was based on the analysis performed by the EU project P3ITS whose deliverable was positively received by the audience. The outcome of the workshop will be taken into account for the final documents that P3ITS will produce and present at its final event in Lyon on 9 June 2011.

At the occasion of the second P3ITS workshop legal experts gave very positive feedback on the analysis the project performed on the legal questions implied by the use of Pre-Commercial Procurement in the field of ITS. The pros and cons of the instrument the comparison with other procurement tools the recommendation to set-up a programme: all these features of the soon-to-be published deliverable were said to give a clear picture of the situation and whilst the risks and uncertainties were not underestimated by the expert audience a general consensus on the appropriateness of PCP for ITS was clearly emerging during the fruitful debates.

Based on the outcome of its two last workshops the P3ITS consortium will now consolidate its analyses and work with its partners to produce guidelines and a roadmap to the attention of public authorities and procurers to help them use safely PCP. The final documents will be presented and discussed with the project’s constituency at the occasion of the P3ITS final event 9 June 2011 in Lyon (FR) right after the closure of the European ITS Congress.

The second P3ITS workshop was hosted on 19 January 2011 by ITS Netherlands / Connekt in Delft (NL) and aimed at presenting and discussing the legal aspects of PCP in ITS with legal experts. The critical questions were discussed straight from the beginning of the workshop thanks to the invited experts who performed a remote reading of the draft project deliverable. Around 35 experts linked to the domain of procurement of innovation and ITS were gathered to comment on the project’s proceedings to explain their experience of PCP to the audience and to network for further collaboration.

 

Pre-Commercial Procurement is an existing but under-utilised tool for public-authorities to include research services and innovation in their procurement processes. On-going PCP programmes have proven to be very successful but PCP so far failed to be widely used especially in the transport and ITS sector although experts believe that it could have a highly positive impact for the deployment of new ITS products and services.

P3ITS is a Support Action funded by the European Commission DG Information Society and Media under the 7th Framework Programme for Research and  technological development and is aiming at maintaining a network of both ITS and legal and procurement experts to trigger a debate which would clarify how Pre-Commercial Procurement could be used for ITS. It is coordinated by ERTICO – ITS Europe.

For more information please contact Sébastien Mure or visit the website here.

 

 

Link to original Article

http://www.ertico.com/p3its-does-the-spadework-on-pre-commercial-procurement-legal-questions-for-the-its-community/

Original Publication Date: Mon 24 Jan 2011