Developing and deploying competences for innovative public procurement: a network perspective

Public procurement is increasingly expected to achieve strategic objectives, necessitating the development of competences for innovative procurement activities. This study investigates how competences are developed and deployed to support innovative public procurement in the Finnish public sector. We used a multi-method qualitative approach: the World Café method to identify future competence needs, followed by semi-structured interviews to explore how these competences are developed and deployed. The findings show that public organizations rely on a network of actors for innovative public procurement. This means that public organizations need both specific competences to perform activities in-house and the ability to leverage competences of external actors, such as suppliers and intermediaries. The paper adopts a network approach to conceptualize how key competences are developed and deployed to support activities in innovative public procurement. It categorizes deployed competences into procedural, relational, and enabling types, linking them to specific procurement activities. The study also distinguishes competence development as direct or indirect, depending on whether the focus is on internalizing new competences or collaborating to enable future use of competences across the network. It contributes by proposing a framework that delineates how internal and external interactions shape individual competence deployment and development, offering insights for both theory and practice.