A global perspective and a clustered international cooperation is necessary to effectively address societal challenges. Due to the scarcity of resources, a clustered cooperation should be mainly limited to those actions considered to achieve greater impact. The need for aligning regional, national and European programming to reach common visions and goals can require synergies between Structural Funds (SF), Horizon 2020 and investments at national and regional levels. Joint calls have been usually adopted to fund transnational projects, whereas public procurement can contribute to the purchasing power of contracting authorities to procue goods and services that foster innovation.

Joint Public Procurement (JPP) is a financial instrument which can be considered an opportunity to be evaluated when addressing solutions to societal challenges. Fostering joint procurements is part of the Europe 2020 key initiatives. By aggregating their resources, public procurers increase their buyer power and may hence obtain better contractual conditions, reach more easily important market threshold values and have at their disposal a stronger instrument for orienting the market. Therefore, joint public procurement can increase the effectiveness of the public procurement procedure and at the same time share the risk linked to the procurement notably of innovative solutions. Contracting authorities from different Member States may be interested in cooperating and in jointly awarding public contracts in order to derive maximum benefit from the potential of the internal market in terms of economies of scale and risk-benefit sharing, not least for innovative projects involving a greater amount of risk than reasonably bearable by a single contracting authority (European Commission, COM 2011 896 final).

In brief, the added values of JPP are:

• JPP’s approach is problem oriented and solution focused.
• JPP can address products/services identified as impacting on tackling societal challenges.
• JPP avoids duplication and reduce fragmentation.
• JPP increases the efficiency and effectiveness of the use of resources.
• JPP increases the connectivity and facilitate the definition of common strategies.
• JPP facilitates the quick response to urgent/emergent issues.
• JPP relates to an innovative cohesion approach: it assures the impact on territory through the usability of the product/service, not excluding the involvement of other territories for the provision of the product/service.

Further details can be read in the CNR report.