End-user involvement enhancing innovativeness in public procurement. evidence from a healthcare procurement

Abstract

This paper examines public procuring, aiming to increase understanding of how the living lab approach and end-user involvement create innovativeness and enhance public procurement results, providing effectiveness and better solutions. The empirical findings are based on a real-life unique public procurement in the healthcare field where the living lab approach was used through the product testing phase, which was included in the procurement procedure. The selected group of users performed product testing in a real homecare environment. The quality of the product formed based on product testing played significant role for the first time in public healthcare-related procurement in the City of Oulu, Finland; the winning solution was not the most inexpensive but the one obtaining the highest quality scores by users. The findings suggest that product testing as a part of public procurement should be more widely adopted, while considering the proper balance of the price-quality ratio that ensures innovativeness. Based on the findings, we propose a framework for product testing as a part of public procurement through an open procedure.