E-procurement and SME involvement in public procurement of innovations: an exploratory study

Current public procurement policies in the European Union (EU) seek to improve small and medium-sized enterprises' (SMEs) access to public procurement, and emphasise public procurement of innovations (PPI) and aim to promote a switch to e-procurement. However, many information and communication related barriers impede SME access to public sector contracts, which could be mitigated by knowledge management (KM). While e-procurement is expected to increase the involvement of SMEs in public procurement, it is not well-understood how or which KM properties of an e-procurement service will best facilitate PPI. This paper presents an exploratory inquiry of how suppliers perceive the properties of an e-procurement platform, and how these properties are associated with their involvement in PPI. The results show that while information exchange properties were not estimated to be as important as other properties they are nevertheless more important in the sense of being positively associated with participating in PPI.