Pre-commercial procurement (PCP), introduced by the European Commission in 2007, is the most important purchasing procedure available to the European Union public sector to solicit innovative solutions from the business sector. As such solutions are not yet in the market, they first require research and development (R&D) activities. PCP is concerned with procuring R&D services only, and typically consists of three phases. This paper aims to discuss how the budget available to the contracting authority (CA) may be optimally allocated along such three phases.,The paper is mostly theoretical and the CA is assumed to maximise the overall probability of success in the PCP, that is the probability of receiving at least one successful proposal at the end of the procedure.,The main finding of the paper suggests that, for a CA, the optimal budget allocation across the three phases of the PCP depends on how likely it is to receive successful proposals in various stages of the procedure, as well as on the rewards paid to the invited companies.,In this paper, the author proposes a methodology for the optimal budget allocation of a CA and discusses how the approach could be practically implemented, pointing out its potential difficulties.,The main social implication of the findings is represented by the best use of the available budget, hence taxpayers’ money.,To the best of the author’s knowledge, no existing paper has discussed the optimal budget allocation in a PCP as in this work.

中文翻译：

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欧盟用于创新的商业前采购中的预算分配设计

欧盟委员会于2007年推出的商业前采购（PCP）是欧盟公共部门可用来向商业部门寻求创新解决方案的最重要的采购程序。由于此类解决方案尚未投放市场，因此它们首先需要研发（R＆D）活动。PCP仅关注采购研发服务，通常包括三个阶段。本文旨在讨论如何在这三个阶段中最佳分配给签约机构（CA）的预算。本文主要是理论上的，假设CA可以使PCP成功的总体可能性最大化，即在该过程结束时至少收到一个成功提案的概率。该论文的主要发现表明，对于CA，