Our 6th External Expert Report was prepared by the External Expert Filomena Vieira of Vieira Procurement Legal Services, and focuses on Innovation Procurement in the EU Security Sector. The report first considers the regulatory state of play and the overall environment and then takes a deep dive into the data, looking at the use of different procurement instruments across EU Member States and how effectively each country is in Innovation Procurement. The report identified several key findings and highlights several best practices for the effective
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Read the report: Innovation Procurement in the EU Security Sector: State of Play, the use of Available Tools across EU Member States, and Best Practices
Executive Summary
This report was prepared for the ENACT consortium (European Network Against Crime and Terrorism, Horizon Europe Cluster 3, coordinated by Polícia Judiciária, Portugal). Considering the revision of Directive 2009/81/EC on defence and sensitive security procurement, and the persisting difficulty in identifying the right tools and instruments to boost innovation uptake, to provide an analytical report on innovation procurement focusing on the state of play, the use of available tools across EU Member States, and best practices.
The report is organised accordingly.
Section 1 sets out the state of play of the EU legal and policy framework: the innovation-procurement instruments available under Directive 2014/24/EU; the specific regime of Directive 2009/81/EC; the Commission’s June 2025 proposal amending that Directive and the comprehensive revision announced for 2026; the pipeline between EU-funded security research and deployment-stage funds; and the integration of EU and national funding, together with the legislative outlook under the proposed 2028–2034 Multiannual Financial Framework and the European Competitiveness Fund.
Section 2 provides the cross-cutting analysis: technology push and capability pull; long innovation cycles; the European Commission’s 2024 benchmarking of national innovation-procurement policy frameworks across thirty countries; the specific trajectory of the security and defence sector within that benchmark; the legal question of which reforms require EU action and which are already available to Member States; and the emerging framework for European preference in defence and security procurement.
Section 3 examines the use of available tools country by country: profiles of the nine ENACT member states, best practices drawn from the wider thirty-country benchmark, and a comparative overview of national transpositions of Directive 2009/81/EC.
Section 4 analyses the relationship between national security research programmes, innovation outcomes, and EU–national funding integration.
Section 5 draws conclusions and recommendations.
Key Findings
- The policy framework for innovation procurement remains under-developed across Europe, including in all ENACT member states. In the European Commission’s 2024 benchmarking of thirty countries (EU-27, Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), the European average score is 33.05%, and no country reaches the “strong performer” category; Finland, the highest-ranked country at 70.23%, is the only one classified as a solid performer. [1] The ENACT member states range from Finland (1st) and Spain (4th) to Greece (16th) and Portugal (20th).
- The security and defence sector records one of the most significant recent advances in national sectoral policy across the benchmark, from a comparatively low starting point. The European average score for the “public order, safety, security and defence” sectoral sub-indicator rose from 12% in the 2020 benchmarking to 40% in 2024, an increase of 28 percentage points — the second-largest sectoral gain after the environment sector (+54 percentage points) — which the Commission’s synthesis links to EU security and defence policies and the geopolitical situation. [2]
- Across the benchmark, policy recognition of innovation procurement is considerably more advanced than the operational instruments needed to implement it. The Commission’s synthesis identifies the six most underdeveloped areas — sectoral policies, action plans, spending targets, monitoring systems, incentives, and capacity building — as unchanged since the previous benchmarking, with average performance below 35% in each. [3]
- The principal legal gap identified for the security and defence sector concerns the acquisition stage, not the research stage. Pre-commercial procurement of research and development services is already available to Member States in the fields of defence and security, as such services fall outside the scope of Directive 2009/81/EC under its research and development exclusion; by contrast, the procedures available for acquiring the resulting solutions within the Directive’s scope are exhaustively defined at EU level and do not currently include the innovation partnership. The Commission’s proposal of 17 June 2025 would introduce the innovation partnership, the open procedure and a simplified route for the direct procurement of innovative products resulting from competitive parallel R&D projects into Directive 2009/81/EC. [4]
- A first EU legal framework for European preference in defence procurement now exists, while its definitional questions remain open. Regulation (EU) 2025/2643 (the European Defence Industry Programme, EDIP), in force since 30 December 2025, conditions EU funding on a maximum of 35% of component costs originating outside the Union and associated countries and on the location of design authority within the Union; published analyses document unresolved questions concerning the calculation methodology, licensing arrangements and supply-chain dependencies. [5]
- The existence of a national security research programme is a poor proxy for procurement capacity. The five countries publicly identified as having such programmes (Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Czechia and Italy) span nearly the full range of the European Innovation Scoreboard classification, and no assessment isolating the effect of programme existence was identified in the sources consulted. Review of the official programme documentation further shows that the category encompasses materially different national arrangements, and that where connections between these programmes and EU funding are documented, they operate at the research stage – contact points, coordination structures, demarcation rules – rather than at the stage of deployment or procurement of results. [6]
- The funding architecture on which security innovation depends is currently being renegotiated. The Commission’s proposal of July 2025 for the 2028–2034 Multiannual Financial Framework would consolidate the instruments at both ends of the research-to-deployment pipeline into a European Competitiveness Fund, integrating the security research component of Horizon Europe into that fund’s work programmes; the European Parliament’s ITRE committee published its draft report in April 2026, and the Council agreed a partial negotiating position in June 2026. Whether the future architecture strengthens or narrows the connection between security research and deployment is among the live questions of that negotiation. [7]
- Best practices are identifiable and specific. The documented differentiators between stronger and weaker national frameworks are: quantified, dated spending targets (Finland; Estonia); annual key performance indicators for individual procurers (applied by only two of the thirty countries benchmarked); permanent competence centres engaging end users; dedicated innovation agencies operating under formal convention with end users and with EU co-financing (Spain’s CDTI with the Ministry of the Interior; France’s AID); and national security and defence strategies that name innovation procurement expressly (Netherlands, Italy, France, Finland).[8]
[1] European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation / PwC EU Services EESV, Synthesis Report for the Benchmarking of National Policy Frameworks for Innovation Procurement (2024 benchmarking), Contract LC-01986029. Available at: https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/document/download/042cc514-04f9-4b2e-9827-91ff3b23883f_en, Section 3.1.1 and Table 1.
[2] European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation / PwC EU Services EESV, Synthesis Report for the Benchmarking of National Policy Frameworks for Innovation Procurement (2024 benchmarking), Contract LC-01986029. Available at: https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/document/download/042cc514-04f9-4b2e-9827-91ff3b23883f_en, Section 3.2.2 and Table 3.
[3] European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation / PwC EU Services EESV, Synthesis Report for the Benchmarking of National Policy Frameworks for Innovation Procurement (2024 benchmarking), Contract LC-01986029. Available at: https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/document/download/042cc514-04f9-4b2e-9827-91ff3b23883f_en, Section 3.2.1.
[4] European Commission, Proposal for a Directive amending Directives 2009/43/EC and 2009/81/EC as regards the simplification of intra-EU transfers of defence-related products and defence and security procurement, 17 June 2025 (Defence Readiness Omnibus). Available at: https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2025-06/Proposal-for-a-directive_defence-simplification.pdf
[5] Council of the European Union, ‘European Defence Industry Programme’, consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/defence-industry-programme; Regulation (EU) 2025/2643. See Section 2.9 of this report for the analyses cited.
[6] Science|Business, ‘Call for dedicated fund for civil security research and deployment’, sciencebusiness.net; European Commission, European Innovation Scoreboard 2024, available at: https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/statistics/performance-indicators/european-innovation-scoreboard_en. See Section 4. On the national programme documentation reviewed, see Sections 4.1–4.3.
[7] Proposal for a Regulation establishing the European Competitiveness Fund (‘ECF’), COM(2025) 555, 16 July 2025. Available at: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A52025PC0555; European Parliament, Draft Report on the proposal for a regulation establishing the European Competitiveness Fund, ITRE-PR-784506, 20 April 2026. Available at:https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/ITRE-PR-784506_EN.pdf; Council of the European Union, ‘MFF 2028-2034: Council agrees its position on new and innovative fund to boost EU’s competitiveness’, press release, 16 June 2026. Available at: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2026/06/16/mff-2028-2034-council-agrees-its-position-on-new-and-innovative-fund-to-boost-eu-s-competitiveness/
[8] The evidence for each practice is set out in Section 3 (of the report); see in particular Sections 3.2 (Finland), 3.3 (Spain), 3.5 (Netherlands), 3.7 (Italy), 3.8 (France) and 3.11 (Estonia and other reference points).