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A diverse community of
leading experts, policymakers
and practitioners

The Institute’s key research themes
are led by ten academic partners
spread across the UK.

We’re a UK-wide research
organisation exploring what
productivity means for business

Businesses are crucial to solving
the UK’s productivity problems.

Research

Public procurement and innovation 'missions'

This project seeks to understand the effectiveness of public procurement as a policy lever to drive innovation. Specifically, the project aims to understand the role and contribution of public procurement as a tool in designing and implementing mission-oriented policies using a rich set of data and methodologies.

The research makes use of a large-scale public sector spend and procurement database provided by the public sector market intelligence company Tussell and links it to other data sources (e.g. UKRI project repository) to investigate the use of public procurement to drive long-term productivity, innovation performance, net-zero or levelling-up.

It complements some of the existing research areas covered at The Productivity Institute. In particular, it contributes to the Organisational Capital and the Institutions and Governance theme, but also links to the themes of: Measurement and Methods; Geography and Place; Knowledge Capital and Social, Environmental and Technological Transitions.

Project lead Elvira Uyarra (The University of Manchester)

The University of Manchester