From Operational Need to Prototype: What Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) Means

When there is no ready-made solution available on the market, Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) can help. It is a competitive procurement of research and development services that leads to the creation of prototypes. How does this process work in practice and when is it worth using? We explain it in this article.

Public contracting authorities cannot always rely on existing tools to perform their tasks. In such cases, a traditional procurement procedure may not solve the problem. The process of Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) offers an important alternative. Within a defined framework, it allows public buyers to commission research and development (R&D) work from several competing suppliers in order to reach functioning prototypes more quickly. One example is the European SHIELD PCP project, which focuses on developing technologies to improve the protection of crowded public spaces. PCP is a multi-stage process that may initially seem complex, but it is worth understanding. In this article we explain how it works step by step.

Why PCP Was Created

In areas with high levels of responsibility—such as public security, the energy sector, healthcare or transport—the problem is often not the absence of technology itself, but the lack of solutions that truly fit specific operational conditions. A product description in a technical specification and its actual ability to integrate with other systems in a given environment are often two very different things. As a result, contracting authorities frequently face a dilemma: should they purchase an available solution that does not fully meet their needs, or initiate a development process to address those needs properly?

This is where PCP comes in. It is a mechanism designed to enable the public sector to stimulate the development of technologies that the market does not yet provide as mature, ready-to-deploy products.

What PCP Is

PCP is a procurement procedure in which the object of the contract is not a finished product, but research and development services leading to the creation and testing of prototypes. A key feature of PCP is the parallel work of several suppliers and the progressive selection of the most promising approaches at each stage.

“PCP is a tool for contracting authorities to acquire Research and Development (R&D) services (and under certain conditions, related R&D results) from several competing technology providers in parallel, to compare alternative solution approaches, and to identify the best value-for-money solutions that the market can deliver to address their needs,” explains Dr Beatriz Gómez Fariñas, Senior Procurement Consultant at Corvers Commercial & Legal Affairs.

“In PCP, there is a risk-benefit sharing under market conditions between the public procurer and the technology providers, and a clear separation between the PCP and the deployment of commercial volumes of end-products,” she adds.

In practice, this means that PCP:

• focuses on the development and validation of solutions, from concept to prototype and demonstration,
• relies on competition and staged evaluation of results,
• remains separate from commercial procurement (large-scale deployment).

PCP step by step: how the process works

Although individual projects may differ in their details, the overall logic of PCP remains the same. Before the PCP procedure itself begins, contracting authorities conduct a preparatory stage that includes analysing needs and defining the challenge to be addressed. Only afterwards is the competitive R&D process launched.

1. Preparatory Stage: Defining Needs and Market Dialogue

Before launching the PCP procedure, contracting authorities:

• identify the main challenges that need to be addressed,
• analyse the market and the maturity of existing technologies,
• conduct consultations with potential technology suppliers,
• carry out cost-benefit analyses to assess whether the process is justified.

The preparatory stage is crucial because the quality of the needs analysis directly influences the evaluation criteria and testing plans. It also allows contracting authorities to determine whether the market is capable of delivering solutions that can realistically be deployed. At this stage it also becomes possible to determine which procurement mechanism is appropriate. If the analysis shows that the required solution does not yet exist on the market or is far from deployment, PCP may be the appropriate approach. If the solution already exists, a traditional procurement procedure may be more suitable. When solutions are close to market readiness, Public Procurement of Innovative Solutions (PPI) may be used. The preparatory stage therefore serves not only to refine the need, but also to confirm whether PCP is in fact the appropriate approach.

In many PCP projects this stage also includes Open Market Consultations (OMC), which help refine technological assumptions, clarify requirements and better understand market capabilities.

2. Launch of the Procedure: Competition and Selection of Contractors

After the preparatory phase, the PCP procedure is formally launched, typically through a call for tenders published in Tenders Electronic Daily (TED). TED is a website that provides free access to public procurement notices published in the European Union, the European Economic Area and other countries.

Companies, either individually or in consortia, submit proposals according to the requirements set out in the procurement documentation. The highest-scoring proposals are selected and covered by framework agreements, which structure participation in the subsequent phases of the PCP process.

3. The three PCP phases: from solution design to demonstration

Only after the preparatory stage is completed does the actual PCP process begin. A typical PCP process consists of three main phases:

• Phase 1: Solution design
  Refinement of the concept, system architecture and research and testing plans
• Phase 2: Prototype development
  Development of prototypes and initial verification of their functionality
• Phase 3: Validation and demonstration
  Testing and demonstration of solutions in environments as close as possible to real operational conditions

After each phase, contractors submit proposals describing how their solution will be developed in the next stage. Only those suppliers whose results meet the required criteria are invited to continue. This approach allows contracting authorities to compare several technological options while gradually reducing the risk of investing in solutions that might not prove effective in practice.

Moving towards commercial procurement (PPI)

The PCP process ends at the research and prototyping stages. If the solutions developed during PCP reach sufficient maturity to enter the market, contracting authorities may launch Public Procurement of Innovative Solutions (PPI) in order to purchase and deploy them commercially. This is a separate procurement procedure with its own call for tenders and dedicated process aimed at acquiring market-ready solutions.

SHIELD PCP: An Example in the Protection of Public Spaces

The PCP mechanism is particularly useful in areas where operational requirements are complex and involve, among other things, the integration of multiple data sources, real-time analysis, resilience to disruptions and cooperation between many stakeholders. This is precisely the context addressed by SHIELD PCP—a project co-coordinated by the Polish Platform for Homeland Security and funded by the European Union. Its goal is to involve public buyers and security practitioners in the development of technologies that respond to real operational needs in the protection of public spaces. However, the origins of the project go back to earlier work carried out within the SHIELD4CROWD project.

From SHIELD4CROWD to SHIELD PCP

The SHIELD4CROWD project laid the foundations for the activities later carried out within SHIELD PCP. It defined a shared operational context and identified the main technological challenges that would guide the next stage of work.

Within SHIELD4CROWD, a final use-case scenario was developed describing the problems faced by practitioners and their key operational challenges. Two main directions of technological development were identified:

• The development of technologies for detecting weapons (such as knives or firearms) and suspicious behaviour without disrupting the flow of people in public spaces such as public transport environments.
• The development of technologies enabling effective coordination and cooperation between stakeholders (in particular law enforcement agencies), for example through the use of digital twins, real-time event mapping, communication tools, social media monitoring or crowd simulation.

In this way SHIELD4CROWD provided the conceptual foundations for the work carried out in SHIELD PCP, where the identified challenges were translated into concrete requirements for solutions developed through the PCP process.

The preparatory stage of SHIELD PCP also included Open Market Consultations (OMC). These consultations helped refine requirements, evaluation criteria and testing methodologies while providing a better understanding of market capabilities. As a result, the subsequent stages of the PCP process could be prepared on the basis of more realistic technological and organisational assumptions. This created the basis for launching the subsequent stages of the PCP process.

Benefits for Public Buyers, Suppliers and Society

PCP creates benefits for several groups of stakeholders.

• Public contracting authorities gain the opportunity to develop technologies that respond directly to their operational needs. Participation in PCP also allows them to provide early feedback and influence the direction of technological development. It also enables interoperability to be planned from the outset and helps reduce dependency on a single supplier.
• Technology suppliers can accelerate their development processes and better align their solutions with the requirements of public sector markets by working on clearly defined operational scenarios.
• Society as a whole benefits indirectly through more efficient use of public funds and the potential improvement of technologies designed to protect lives and public safety.

The benefits described above result from the specific nature of the PCP mechanism—a structured and competitive way of procuring innovation. In this model the public sector finances R&D work leading to the development of prototypes and, if these solutions reach market maturity, may later proceed to commercial procurement through a separate PPI procedure.

The example of SHIELD PCP, based on the experience and foundations developed in SHIELD4CROWD, demonstrates how a clearly identified operational need and a shared scenario can evolve into an innovation process with a real chance of producing a useful and validated prototype.

Polish Platform for Homeland Security (PPHS) has long been involved in the development and implementation of new security solutions, bringing together research institutions, industry and public services. If you are looking for an experienced partner in such initiatives, feel free to contact us at contact@pphs.pl.

We also invite you to follow updates on our website and the LinkedIn profiles of PPHS and SHIELD PCP to stay informed about the progress of the PCP process within the project.