Procurement
With an annual volume of more than 100 billion euros, public procurement is one of the most powerful instruments the Netherlands has to stimulate innovation. How do we make the most of that potential and ensure the government becomes less dependent on foreign parties?
Right now, a tender procedure takes nine to eighteen months on average. Framework agreements and legal complexity make the barrier to entry unnecessarily high for new players, which is why five suppliers consistently take home two-thirds of major IT contracts. And because large technical projects are tendered out as a whole, central government loses its grip on the substance and creates its own dependencies.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Through the G-Cloud framework, the United Kingdom procures digital services within two to four weeks, and 42 percent of contracts go to small and medium-sized enterprises. Estonia works with the X-Road architecture, in which modular procurement prevents vendor lock-in and always leaves the government with alternatives at hand.
The Delta Institute is now mapping out where the Dutch procurement system gets stuck, from legal frameworks to the day-to-day administration for companies and civil servants. We compare international success models and estimate what a renewed system would yield — for the Dutch economy and for our digital sovereignty. With that, we’re building toward a pilot in which new forms of procurement can be tested in practice.
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