Doha: Public procurement innovation is becoming a subject of great interest for Qatar as it is a way to position the country as early adopters of innovation to attract multinational companies, said an official during an online event.
HBKU organised a webinar, under its Law and Tech Talk Series, entitled ‘Public Procurement and Innovation’ which highlighted how public bodies could leverage the public procurement process to encourage innovation in the public sector. The introduction was given by Dr. Susan L Karamanian, Dean, College of Law, HBKU and Dr. Georgios Dimitropoulos, Associate Professor, College of Law, HBKU moderated the event.
Public procurement is the process of identifying what is needed and the best entity to supply this need in an efficient and transparent way in a public institution.
Beyond primary procurement objectives, such as delivering goods and services, it is now generally accepted that public procurement may also serve secondary policy objectives such as innovation and sustainable growth.
Eman Al Kuwari, Head of Emerging Technology at MCIT said, “Public procurement innovation is becoming very important for the public sector and government as it enables the public sector to modernise faster and helps to create better services, value for money. It also enables wider solutions in the country and opportunity for faster growth. Public procurement is one of the main drivers of economy which brings innovation faster into any country.”
“It is becoming a great interest for Qatar because this is a way for us to position ourselves as early adopters of innovation to attract multinational companies to establish here who are having these policies for innovation. For us in Tasmu, we have a great smart country vision which has done two things - to put innovation and public procurement, we have established a great demand, a roadmap of 100 projects to tell the companies that we do need innovation. This is where we create a different kind of conversation than the traditional procurement methodology that countries have. Therefore, public procurement innovation is very important,” she added.
When you talk about public procurement innovation there has to be direct governing body that helps orchestrate the efforts between all these entities and helps create governing rules that drives it into the right procurement channels and helps bring innovation forward she elaborated.
“There are many things we came across and are trying to improve as we go and experience in the country and trying to create an agility of development in our policies. For example, when we are trying to create the sandbox environment, we create agility in our terms, to pilot and test our solutions to improve our defined projects in the beginning. So, there are certain challenges as there is not a single entity that we are providing the solution, it is a multi stake holding product and the governance becomes a key issue if it is not pre-defined from the beginning and a clear governance from the get-go,” she said.
For us in terms of the smart country programs we are focusing on five priority sectors such as transport, logistics, healthcare, environment, and sports with the highest maturity in terms of technology adoption which allows us to prove our methodology and the way we are trying to reach which has the highest impact for the citizen and resident kind of service to innovate o and also has a high economic return.
Qatar has developed in a very fast-paced manner, and it has grown amazingly in the past few decades. However, our procurement is meant for construction for the country to be built in terms of infrastructure, buildings, roads and highways she explained. Public procurement innovation can have multiple channels depending on the sector it is trying to serve and to reach the final goal. It will still remain the main channel however there are ways to enhance it fits to needs of different entities, she noted.
Steven L Schooner, Nash & Cibinic Professor of Government Procurement Law George Washington University Law School and Ioannis Petrou, Procurement Complaints Officer, European Investment Bank (EIB) also participated in the event.
