What are Publicly Owned Enterprises (POEs) according to the different national contexts and national legislations? What are the factors stimulating the emergence of POEs? What advantages can POEs bring about to local level public services provision? What challenges do POEs face in their compliance with European and national regulations? Are there alternatives to POEs?
These are some of the questions discussed during the 5 th International Partners Meeting on 18-19 September 2013 in Genoa (Italy), when the CCIC project partners came together to discuss one of the four project’s thematic areas: Publicly Owned Enterprises. The CCIC project (Complex Challenges, Innovative Cities – www.ccic-project.eu), funded by the programme INTERREG IVC of the European Union, aims to support public sector innovation on the local level and consists of a consortium of 14 European partners from 10 different countries.
During the first day of the event, ARC Fund presented the results of the analytical state-of-the-art report on Innovation in the Public Sector. The report, which is a key deliverable to the CCIC project, was produced by a team at ARC Fund and presents an overview of how public sector innovation is made possible on the local and regional level within the contexts of the involved project partners. The presentation focused on the major conclusions of the report, including theoretical findings, such as models and proposed definition of public sector innovation, as well as policy-relevant conclusions in the fields of public procurement, civil society, financial instruments, publicly owned enterprises, drivers and barriers of innovation in the public sector.
On the second day of the International Partners Meeting, experts from the participating in the consortium countries presented good practices on POEs from their local contexts. These included, among others, a presentation by the CEO of A.M.I.U., an Italian publicly owned enterprise in the field of waste collection and waste recycling, which managed to significantly increase the efficiency and effectiveness of its processes, resulting in improved quality of the services it provides. Another good practice example was the ESA Business Incubation Centre located in Italy’s Lazio region. The incubator supports commercial applications of space technologies in the development of innovative products with non-space purposes.
Besides the presentation of innovative good practices from different partner regions, interesting discussions related to different aspects of POEs’ utility and innovation capacity took place during the event’s sessions. These were to some extent provoked by scepticism expressed by some participants as to the capacity of POEs to sustain good quality of service provision in the respective regions. As an alternative to POEs the implementation of an organised cooperation between the public and private organisations was mentioned, based on common strategy and implementation plan with a clear and defined role for the public sector.
