Public procurement represents a very large share of most economies worldwide. Besides its direct purchasing power, public procurement has an enormous potential to become one of the most important mission-oriented policy instruments in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals. The paper argues that the key to achieve more innovations when pursuing public procurement is to describe problems to be solved or functions to be fulfilled (functional procurement) instead of describing the products to be bought (product procurement). We contend that if products can be described in the procurement documents, it is because they exist, and hence, they cannot be regarded as innovations. Innovations cannot be described ex ante, simply because they do not exist. It is thus not accurate to talk about ‘innovation procurement’. Accordingly, the only way to achieve an innovation by means of procurement is by describing the functions it shall fulfill or the problems it shall solve. For public procurement to become an effective policy instrument supporting innovation, product procurement should thus be transformed into functional procurement. Hence, contracting authorities need to identify the problems to be addressed by policy. The new products (innovations) solving the problems are to be designed by the potential innovators/suppliers, not by public procurers. Hence, the societal needs and problems must be translated and transformed into functional requirements. Functional procurement is allowed in EU regulations, and hence, there are no legal obstacles to use it for innovation policy purposes. Above and beyond, the European directives recommend using functional requirements “as widely as possible”. Besides, it leads to increased competition, not only among potential suppliers of similar products, but also among different products that solve the same problem. Functional procurement thus not only supports innovation but also serves as a powerful instrument of competition policy.

中文翻译：

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创新、福利和环境的功能采购

公共采购占全球大多数经济体的很大一部分。除了直接购买力外，公共采购还有巨大潜力成为可持续发展目标背景下最重要的以任务为导向的政策工具之一。本文认为，在进行公共采购时，实现更多创新的关键是描述要解决的问题或要完成的功能（功能采购），而不是描述要购买的产品（产品采购）。我们认为，如果采购文件中可以描述产品，那是因为它们存在，因此不能视为创新。创新不能事前描述，仅仅因为它们不存在。因此，谈论“创新采购”并不准确。因此，通过采购实现创新的唯一途径是描述其应履行的功能或解决的问题。为使公共采购成为支持创新的有效政策工具，产品采购应转变为功能采购。因此，订约当局需要确定政策要解决的问题。解决问题的新产品（创新）由潜在的创新者/供应商设计，而不是由公共采购者设计。因此，必须将社会需求和问题转化为功能需求。欧盟法规允许功能性采购，因此，将其用于创新政策目的没有法律障碍。超越，欧洲指令建议“尽可能广泛地”使用功能要求。此外，这会导致竞争加剧，不仅是类似产品的潜在供应商之间，而且是解决同一问题的不同产品之间的竞争。因此，职能采购不仅支持创新，而且还是竞争政策的有力工具。