Public Procurement and Innovation: A Scoping Review

Public policy is an important theme in Science Technology and Innovation (STI) research and public procurement is a powerful tool that governments can use to influence innovation. There is a growing body of literature which investigates public procurement and innovation. The aim of this paper is to systematically review the literature on the topic. A scoping review is conducted and 99 journal articles are annotated according to different variables of interest. The scoping review allows characterization of the field of study. The key findings are an explosion of academic interest in the topic since 2008, the existence of thematic communities within the literature, a prevalence of qualitative use of data and a high share of empirical work. Theoretical foundations are varied and often referred to exclusively in the corpus, and although a variety of contexts are considered, the geographical context of research is overwhelmingly concentrated in OECD and EU countries. Pursuing the findings further promises to be fertile grounds for research that increases knowledge about this topic.