P3ITS is a new collaborative project that will enhance pre-commercial public procurement for Intelligent Transport Systems and Services innovation and deployment.
Pre-commercial procurement is an approach for public authorities for procuring R&D services which is largely promoted by the European Commission. By acting as technologically demanding first buyers of new R&D public procurers can drive innovation from the demand side.
In the ITS sector public authorities play a major role in making a success of cooperative ITS. In order to ensure a wide European deployment of cooperative ITS public authorities should establish national cooperative infrastructure (road side equipment) that ensures cross-border interoperability and cross-brand interoperability of systems.
Pre-commercial procurement is considered as a tool which could not only boost cooperative ITS innovation but also improve the conditions to move from the current R&D stage towards a large scale market of ITS services.
The P3ITS project has been set up to start a dialogue between procurement experts experts and industry professionals from the ITS sector and procurement agencies with the aim of building a network of procurers and industry experts as consultation partners.
Due to the complexity of the topic the project will address more or less ‘isolated’ problem definitions. P3ITS will first focus on the needs and requirements for the innovation and migration from RTD toward large scale market of cooperative ITS services.
The P3ITS is an 18 month project coordinated by ERTICO which includes 12 partners from the public and private sector. The project is currently underway. The 12 partners have already started actively collecting information from all consortium members on three different issues: experts within ITS/innovation/PCP; which focus area from the ITS world they are interested in; and identifying on-going projects that touches on elements from PCP. The biggest challenge in P3ITS it to make sure that the right experts both from the ITS industry and PCP are identified and included in the work P3ITS is doing as only then will the project have a larger base for putting together roadmaps and guidelines on how PCP can be used to support the ITS and in particular cooperate systems. 
The project is funded through the European Commission 7th Framework Programme for R&D.
For more information visit the P3ITS website or contact Rasmus Lindholm
Link to original Article
http://www.ertico.com/p3its-to-create-a-network-of-procurers-and-industry-for-the-its-sector-2/
Original Publication Date: Tue 27 Jul 2010
