PCP Academy
Public money can be a powerful driver of innovation or an invisible barrier to it. I work with public authorities on why and how that power can be efficiently used, with lasting impact, to solve the problems that matter for society and that markets alone will not solve.
I have spent over two decades working at the intersection of public policy, regulatory frameworks, and market innovation — not as an observer, but as someone who stays until the problem is solved.
My work is not consulting in the conventional sense. I engage with challenges that I believe are worth engaging with: structurally significant, demanding across legal, economic and institutional dimensions, and genuinely useful for citizens. I carry part of the weight until concrete results are achieved.
My main focus so far has been the demand side of innovation. For most of my career this has meant working on why and how public authorities can use their purchasing power to stimulate new solutions, open competitive markets, and avoid the lock-in and duplication that traditional incentive instruments produce.
I work primarily with public institutions — governments, regions, cities, European bodies, innovation agencies. I also work with companies that innovate and need to navigate the public procurement ecosystem as a market entry strategy.
I teach. I write. I engage in public debate when policy frameworks introduce unintended distortions — in markets or in the behaviour of actors — and when the issue is significant enough to warrant taking a position.
Innovation procurement is often uncritically reduced to pre-commercial procurement — applied beyond its proper scope and without the analytical rigour the instrument requires. The actual field is broader: it encompasses demand-side policy design, instrument selection, competitive market creation, and the governance of public investment across the full innovation cycle — all in service of one objective: innovation that is adopted, scaled, and used.
The question is never which instrument? — it is where the true and equitable benefit for the public sector and for society actually lies, and what kind of intervention produces durable and valuable change rather than isolated projects.
Principles, not statements
Innovation policy generates more declarations than results. Every project must be designed to move from strategy to implementation to measurable impact — and must be evaluated on that basis alone.
PCP Academy accepts assignments only when the challenge is structurally significant and the proposed intervention is genuinely capable of generating public value. Public resources must be directed at what truly matters.
Analysis and recommendations are free from partisan agendas and market interests. The only objective is policy and interventions that work — legally, economically, operationally, and ethically. This sometimes means identifying where a policy needs to be corrected or improved.
Several engagements have consisted primarily in ensuring the legal consistency and correctness of frameworks that were built on assumptions that were unfounded or misaligned with the actual regulatory and economic context — particularly the confusion between funding instruments and procurement instruments, which carries real legal and competitive consequences.
Delivery does not end with a report. PCP Academy stays through implementation, troubleshoots what goes wrong, and measures whether the policy objective was actually met. Results, not recommendations, are the deliverable.
Innovation procurement is worth doing only if it opens markets to new solutions, removes barriers to innovation, and generates tangible benefit for citizens and institutions. Recognition matters only as evidence of that.
Before the answers, the right questions
Between 2004 and 2006, when European policy on innovation procurement was still being written, these questions were posed — to the European Commission, to public authorities beginning to experiment with demand-side instruments, and to the institutions that would eventually have to implement what the policy prescribed. They were not rhetorical. They required answers. Some of those answers took the form of legal frameworks, governance models, and operational guidelines. Others became programmes, evaluations, and procurement procedures. The questions remain the foundation of the work carried out today.
A record — partial — of the work
The following is a selection of engagements. It is not exhaustive.
First structured international benchmarking of demand-side innovation instruments and the limits of traditional grant-based incentive models, including comparative analysis of the US SBIR model — conducted in collaboration with the US Small Business Administration, Washington DC — and the Australian and Japanese approaches to public demand-side innovation policy.
Design of an early regional pre-commercial procurement framework for Valle d’Aosta Region, integrating demand-side innovation instruments with regional development strategies. Energy efficiency domain. Formal hearing before the European Commission on foundational questions of demand-side innovation policy — presenting and submitting the regional framework to independent institutional scrutiny.
Design of the first regional PCP governance model in Italy. The framework was subsequently recognised by the European Commission as a best practice in innovation procurement policy implementation.
Strategic, legal and technical advice to the Italian Government (Department for Digitalisation and Technological Innovation) for introducing PCP into national research and innovation policy. Definition of the Italian PCP framework, operational guidelines, and contextualisation within ICT-specific regulations.
Contribution to legislative acts integrating innovation procurement within Decreto Legge “Crescita 2.0”.
Expert support to the Italian Ministry for Universities and Research (MIUR) and the Italian Ministry of Economic Development (MISE) for the design and implementation of a large-scale national PCP funding programme. Independent evaluation of more than 190 innovation challenges submitted by public administrations across Convergence Regions under the national call (DD 437/2013), within a programme initially funded by €150M.
Legal and strategic advisory to Lombardy Region for integrating PCP and PPI instruments within EU Structural Funds co-funded Regional Operational Programmes, coherent with Smart Specialisation. First regional PCP in the healthcare sector financed on ordinary regional funds in Italy.
Legal and policy advisory to the Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center (Poland) and the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic for contextualising PCP within national R&D and innovation regulatory frameworks, aligned with EU State Aid and competition rules.
Contribution to major European Commission studies: Quantifying the Impact of PCP in the ICT Sector (SMART 2014/0009) and Strategic Use of Innovation Procurement (SMART 2016/0040). These studies helped establish European monitoring frameworks for innovation procurement policy.
Co-design and implementation of the P2I (Procure to Innovate) network, supporting the creation of National Competence Centres for Innovation Procurement across Europe. National action plans, sectoral strategies, and funding synergies. Appointed by BME to support the network Secretariat.
Strategic and legal support to Sardinia Region / Sardegna Ricerche for the design and implementation of a regional innovation procurement action plan integrated within Structural Funds programmes and Smart Specialisation strategies. This initiative received the European Innovation Procurement Award (2024).
Two consecutive recognitions awarded at the Innovation Procurement Conference, organised by the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the EU in collaboration with the European Commission and the European Innovation Council.
Assignment from the Directorate General for Research & Innovation to analyse the challenges, effectiveness and impacts of EU-funded PCPs and PPIs, to improve the design and roll-out of instruments in the next Framework Programme for R&I.
The scope of the work
Instruments must be chosen with precision for each context. The first question is never which procurement instrument — it is whether procurement is the right instrument at all, where the public authority’s comparative advantage lies in the innovation chain, and which regulatory framework governs the intervention.
Evidence that shapes policy
Original research, policy studies and publications that have informed and shaped the European debate on innovation procurement.
Expert study examining the effectiveness, challenges and long-term impacts of EU-funded PCP and PPI initiatives, with focus on innovation scale-up. Commissioned by the European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, Directorate G — Common Policy Centre, Unit G1.
European Commission — ISBN 978-92-68-23182-1Comparative analysis of national innovation procurement policy frameworks across EU Member States. Benchmarks policy adoption, proposes monitoring methodologies, and integrates results into European scoreboards (DESI, EDPR).
Contributing author — in: European Commission Study SMART 2016/0040 (PwC)One of the first empirical assessments of the economic and technological impacts of PCP programmes. Covers methodology design, survey instruments, selection criteria, interviews with procurers and suppliers, and dataset analysis tools.
Bedin S., DeCarolis F. (Bocconi University), Iossa E. (Proxenter) — ISBN 978-92-79-51772-3Policy contribution addressing the role of public procurement of research services, with focus on market access for new entrants and the design of competitive conditions in publicly-funded R&D contracts.
European Commission — State Aid R&D&I Framework 2014The first comprehensive operational guidelines for the introduction and implementation of pre-commercial procurement within the Italian public administration system.
Digital Agenda Italia — Pre-print versionAward
2024
European Innovation Procurement Awards
The awards celebrate outstanding practices that leverage procurement to stimulate innovation and address major societal challenges across the European Union. The ceremonies took place at the Innovation Procurement Conference 2024 and 2025, hosted in Brussels by the European Commission and the European Innovation Council.
Recognition is not an objective. It is what happens when rigorous, independent work — done over many years, on the right problems — eventually produces results that others find worth noting.
Education as a responsibility
Teaching is not a secondary activity — it is one of the most consequential things PCP Academy does. At one end: senior public officials, procurement practitioners, and graduate students learning to think strategically about innovation policy and institutional change. At the other: primary and secondary school students encountering, often for the first time, the idea that economic and social systems can be understood, questioned, and changed. The thread connecting both is the same — building the capacity to ask the right questions, with the drive to pursue them and the rigour to act on the answers.
University and institutional programmes
Teaching innovation procurement — its legal, economic and strategic dimensions — to public officials, senior civil servants, procurement practitioners and graduate students. Programmes include:
- SDA Bocconi — CERGAS — Innovation procurement in healthcare management (Master in Management per la Sanità)
- Università di Torino with ANAC and SNA — Innovation procurement comparative law and practice (Master II level “Strategie per l’efficienza, l’integrità e l’innovazione nei contratti pubblici”)
- Università LUM — School of Management — Innovation procurement policy
- Università Magna Graecia di Catanzaro — Dipartimento di Giurisprudenza, Economia e Sociologia
- CEFPAS — Centro per la Formazione Permanente e l’Aggiornamento del Personale del Servizio Sanitario
- CURSUS — Coordinamento Universitario Regionale per la Formazione Superiore in Salute e Sociale
- Collegio Europeo di Parma
- Inter-institutional European academy programmes (INSPIRE, HOOP, LEA projects)
- Customised training programmes for senior public managers on procurement strategy, research and innovation incentive systems, and intellectual property valorisation models
- Coaching and change management for public administrations implementing new instruments
- Strategic and operational design of public communication — institutional events, conference facilitation
Young people — a different kind of engagement
The work with younger students — in financial literacy, law and economics, and international relations — is driven by a different motivation: the belief that proximity to complex real-world problems, early in an educational journey, changes how people think about institutions and about their own capacity to act within them.
The objective here is not only to transmit content. It is above all to prepare students to ask the right questions — and to understand why those questions are hard.
- Italian state teaching qualification — law, economics, and international relations
- Financial literacy programmes for primary and secondary school students
- Design of practical and experiential training interventions — group dynamics, collaborative learning, financial and civic literacy for children and adolescents
Activities directed at young people are designed for minors but may be requested exclusively by adults — parents, teachers, and representatives of educational institutions and school bodies — who may contact PCP Academy directly to enquire about programmes and availability. No direct engagement with minors takes place outside of an institutional or parental framework.
A partial record of collaborations
- European Commission — DG Research & Innovation
- European Commission — DG CONNECT
- European Commission — DG REGIO
- European Innovation Council
- European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA)
- European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA)
- Italian Government — Dept. for Digitalisation and Technological Innovation
- Italian Ministry for Universities and Research (MIUR)
- Italian Ministry of Economic Development (MISE)
- Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center
- Technology Agency of the Czech Republic
- Lombardy Region
- Sardinia Region / Sardegna Ricerche
- Valle d’Aosta Region
- Friuli Venezia Giulia Region
- BME — German Association for Supply Chain Management, Procurement and Logistics
- Procure2Innovate (P2I) — European network of National Competence Centres on innovation procurement
Where the work has been applied
PCP Academy has operated across a wide range of public service domains. The common thread is not the sector — it is the presence of a significant societal challenge that public demand, if correctly structured, can help solve.
Assistive technologies, hospital-acquired infection diagnostics, HEMS emergency services, pre-operative stress reduction, chronic disease monitoring.
E-government services, cloud computing for PA, e-procurement systems, smart metering.
Soil decontamination (BRODISE, POSIDON projects — step-change in the sector), circular bioeconomy, waste management, environmental monitoring.
Renewable energy, wave energy conversion technologies, smart grids.
Urban organic waste recovery, wastewater valorisation and reuse, industrial symbiosis, circular public procurement frameworks.
Energy-efficient public buildings, building renovation, off-grid zero emission buildings.
Personalised learning platforms for primary and secondary schools (LEA, IMAILE projects), mathematics and STEM innovation, educational publishing and edtech procurement frameworks.
Smart water metering (SMART.MET), lagoon and aquatic ecosystem management, integrated water resource governance, utility innovation procurement.
I work on problems worth solving — not on all problems.
If you are working on a structurally significant challenge in innovation procurement, public demand policy, or the design of programmes that connect public institutions to emerging technologies — a conversation is the right place to start.