Public procurement is one of the most direct and traceable channels through which Big Science investments generate wider socio-economic benefit, yet it remains significantly underexploited as an innovation lever. That is the central argument of a new brief report published in EPJ Research Infrastructures on 26 September 2026, which draws on the public procurement of innovation literature and on practitioner perspectives from four major European research infrastructure organisations: the European Space Agency, the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council Industrial Liaison Office, NWO-I through the INPROCAP project, and the European Spallation Source ERIC. The paper was developed through a roundtable on knowledge spillovers through Big Science procurement at the Economics of Big Science Workshop held at the London School of Economics in April 2026.
The socio-economic case for public investment in Big Science rests on knowledge externalities: the scientific outputs of large research infrastructures generate societal benefits that markets underprovide. But that case, the authors argue, is analytically robust yet politically fragile. In an era of fiscal pressure, the benefits are diffuse, long-term, and almost impossible to attribute to specific investments, and governments increasingly demand more visible, near-term justification. Procurement occupies a distinctive position in this landscape. Unlike publications, trained researchers or spin-offs, which are spillover channels that diffuse slowly and broadly, contracts generate direct financial flows, contractual obligations and traceable relationships between a public buyer and private suppliers. They are the most immediate and politically legible channel through which Big Science investment generates wider economic benefit, yet procurement receives comparatively little analytical attention as an innovation lever within the Big Science literature, which has focused primarily on measuring aggregate socio-economic returns rather than on the design conditions that shape them.
The report examines three interconnected challenges: understanding the mechanisms through which procurement generates knowledge spillovers, developing measurement frameworks adequate to capture what matters, and closing the governance and design gap between known good practice and what organisations actually do. Interest in how public demand drives technological development is longstanding, evolving through successive waves of policy interest from 1980s industrial policy debates through to today’s economic security and mission-oriented agendas. The public procurement of innovation literature frames public buyers not merely as passive consumers but as active shapers of markets and innovation trajectories. Public procurement can influence the size, sophistication and direction of demand for innovation: large public sector demand guarantees a level of production, reduces uncertainty, absorbs early-stage research and development risk, and signals that investment will be rewarded. The public sector can be a demanding, credible buyer that legitimises new technology and helps diffuse it through standards. Indirectly, winning a contract has a reputational effect, potentially attracting investors and wider customers, and procurement influences competition and market structure through decisions about participation, contract size and contract length.
Empirical studies confirm positive effects of public procurement on product and process innovation, research and development investment, and patenting, and these effects can be amplified when combined with research and development support. Small and medium-sized enterprises, financially constrained firms, and firms in less developed regions tend to benefit most. Critically, there is evidence of harm as well as benefit if procurement is not well designed: procurement focused exclusively on price compliance actively suppresses innovation. Big Science procurement is nonetheless distinctive in important ways. Research infrastructure organisations are simultaneously technology co-developers, sole guarantors of early demand for technologies with no clear commercial market, and industrial policy actors operating under governance logics with no domestic equivalent, including through juste retour, or georeturn, and in-kind contribution models.
Procurement generates spillovers through a sequence of interconnected processes. Procurement design, including market engagement, technical specifications, contract structure and intellectual property provisions, shapes the nature and intensity of buyer-supplier interaction. This interaction can generate technological and organisational learning, while participation in a prestigious Big Science project can provide reputational certification and access to new markets. Whether these effects translate into sustained commercialisation, exports and productivity gains depends on moderating conditions, including market structure, supplier absorptive capacity, entrepreneurial intent and the wider governance framework. The central causal mechanism is buyer-supplier interaction: how buyers engage markets before a tender is issued, how they define what they need, and how they structure the contract itself all determine whether procurement stimulates genuine innovation or merely purchases existing capability. Market engagement practices significantly increase the likelihood of innovation outcomes from procurement, and outcome-based specifications allow buyers to define the problem rather than the solution, opening the field to approaches that prescriptive requirements would exclude.
Pre-commercial procurement takes this further, buying research and development services in competitive parallel phases with intellectual property rights remaining with suppliers, so that solutions can be commercialised well beyond the procuring organisation’s own domain. A concrete illustration is CERN’s innovation challenge for a novel data-driven method to monitor Legionella growth in cooling towers. By defining the problem neutrally, structuring procurement in phased development stages, and preserving supplier intellectual property rights, the exploratory project revealed global commercial potential for urgent applications in settings such as hospitals, offices and industrial plants. Buyer-supplier interaction can also generate spillovers through reputational signalling: winning a contract from a globally recognised research infrastructure functions as a quality certification with international reach, opening doors to other research infrastructures and to private market customers and investors that an equivalent research grant typically does not. This effect is particularly valuable for smaller and younger firms seeking to establish credibility in technically demanding markets. How large research infrastructure organisations build capability and open market doors is illustrated by a manufacturer that began supplying components to CERN in 1984 and now exports 95 percent of its output to global markets.
Market structure is better understood as a moderating condition: procurement shapes who participates in the supply chain, on what terms, and with what long-run capability implications. The georeturn principle and in-kind contribution models may favour large national incumbents, potentially limiting opportunities for newer and potentially more innovative firms. Addressing this requires deliberate and innovative institutional design. The European Space Agency has a dedicated industrial policy for small and medium-sized enterprise involvement, ranging from guaranteed advance payments and dedicated clauses applied to technology development procurements limiting the eligibility of large system-integrators, to reserved shares for smaller firms in large development procurements, standardised contracts applicable across the entire contractual chain, and supporting measures such as training and business-to-business opportunities. These measures appear to have supported innovation and the development of space industries in member states and firms that might otherwise have had more limited access to ESA programmes and funding. Today, more than 1,700 small and medium-sized enterprises working with ESA represent about 32 percent of all ESA contracted companies and are involved in almost 40 percent of all ESA contracts. ESA has also pioneered the Space Lending Envelope, a financial instrument providing around 1.5 billion euros in loans on more favourable terms to space-economy smaller firms and start-ups in partnership with the European Investment Bank. These effects are not automatic: whether procurement-generated learning, signalling and market-access effects become durable spillovers depends on buyer capability, governance flexibility, and a supplier ecosystem able to absorb the knowledge that procurement relationships can generate.
Measurement is where the field’s weaknesses become most visible. The dominant metric across Big Science organisations is the industrial return coefficient, the ratio of contractual value won by member-state suppliers to their financial contribution. It is visible and politically legible, but poorly suited to capturing innovation effects: it does not differentiate between servicing coffee machines and developing the next generation of semiconductors, captures neither process innovation nor capability development, and provides no basis for understanding which procurement practices generate spillovers and which do not. The academic literature faces its own measurement problems. Patent-based output measures are a poor way to capture process innovations, yet improvements in manufacturing precision, project management capability and technical problem-solving are consistently identified by suppliers as the primary benefit of Big Science contracts. Knowledge spillovers of this kind are frequently too intangible to be captured through standard metrics and can only be gathered through direct relationships with firms and longitudinal case studies. The evidence base is also highly concentrated: CERN, exceptional in its data transparency and scale, accounts for most of the rigorous causal work. Recent work using synthetic control methods and input-output modelling suggests that firm-level studies significantly underestimate the full economic return from Big Science procurement, though whether these patterns generalise across procurement models, facility types and member-state industrial structures remains open.
More adequate measurement would require longitudinal tracking of supplier outcomes after contract completion, survey instruments designed for the Big Science supplier ecosystem, administrative data linking procurement contracts to firm-level innovation, productivity and export outcomes, and systematic classification of contracts by innovation content from the supplier’s perspective rather than merely by technological category from the facility’s. Some organisations are beginning to move in this direction. STFC is developing three-year follow-up impact case studies on contracts won by UK firms, precisely because the contractual return metric fails to capture the innovation and capability effects that constitute the real prize. ESA structures measurement around Technology Readiness Levels set at programme outset, providing a first-order classification of innovation ambition that can be linked to follow-on investment and spillover tracking, with programmes classified by their intended TRL progression and by whether they are mission-agnostic or mission-specific. The available evidence and practitioner perspectives suggest the constraints are not purely methodological but also organisational: in many research infrastructure organisations, limitations in the people, time and systems available to collect, structure and analyse procurement outcome data may constrain progress towards more systematic measurement.
On governance, there is reasonable consensus on what innovation-oriented procurement looks like in practice: open, neutrally specified challenges, phased competitive development, intellectual property provisions permitting commercialisation, early market engagement before specifications are issued, long-term supplier relationships, and post-contract follow-up. The gap lies in absorptive capacity within procurement teams, in institutional cultures that equate procurement with compliance, and in governance structures that reward contractual return over innovation quality. A persistent barrier is the tendency of facilities to arrive at the market with a fully developed technical solution and ask suppliers to manufacture rather than develop, curtailing the scope for innovation before a contract is even issued. Three governance features are particularly consequential. The ERIC legal form, which is exempt from EU procurement directives, makes it possible to embed innovation as an explicit procurement principle and to revise rules iteratively as operational experience accumulates. In-kind contribution models create a fragmented procurement landscape that limits the procuring facility’s leverage over design, specification and supplier development, and whether in-kind or competitive cash procurement generates more spillovers is an open empirical question of direct relevance to facilities currently in the design phase. Juste retour mechanisms, often a political prerequisite for member-state participation, may also limit innovation if they favour large national incumbents over more innovative but less established firms. Industrial liaison offices are the most direct institutional bridge between research infrastructure procurement and the national supplier ecosystem, and where they function effectively they act as institutional entrepreneurs, actively shaping procurement cultures and supplier capabilities rather than passively distributing tender information. The INPROCAP project, a Horizon Europe consortium of seven European partners running from 2024 to 2027, represents the most ambitious current attempt to systematise this role across the European industrial liaison network, building shared capacity in pre-commercial procurement, phased development and intellectual property-sharing approaches. The procurement implications of the transition from construction to operations are often underestimated: operations-phase procurement may also be innovation-intensive, as the European Spallation Source illustrates, where, as its target station moved from construction into operation, procurement needs shifted from delivering pre-specified components to solving problems that had not yet been anticipated at the design stage. The report concludes that procurement is not a passive channel through which Big Science benefits happen to leak into the wider economy but a designable and measurable lever, and it recommends that research infrastructure organisations treat innovation as an explicit procurement objective, that industrial liaison offices move beyond tender dissemination towards a more active role in identifying supplier capabilities and supporting smaller firms, and that European-level coordination support common approaches to measuring procurement outcomes and systematic learning across facilities, while acknowledging that how these effects vary across governance models, procurement regimes, facility types and life-cycle stages remains unknown.
Subject of Research: How public procurement by Big Science research infrastructures generates innovation spillovers, and how measurement and governance could be improved
Article Title: Procurement as an Innovation Lever for Big Science: Mechanisms, Measurement, and an Agenda for Change
Article References: Uyarra, E., Martina, A., Fletcher, S., Kooistra, R., & Menninga, M. (2026). Procurement as an Innovation Lever for Big Science: Mechanisms, Measurement, and an Agenda for Change. EPJ Research Infrastructures, 10(1), Article 32. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41781-026-00190-7
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1007/s41781-026-00190-7
Keywords: Big Science, public procurement of innovation, research infrastructures, knowledge spillovers, European Space Agency, CERN, industrial return coefficient, pre-commercial procurement, INPROCAP, ERIC governance, industrial liaison offices, European Spallation Source
News Source: Denise Maddox. (October 28, 2026). Big Science Procurement Could Be a Powerful Innovation Lever, If Redesigned. Scienmag.
