Public procurement and innovation is the subject of a growing body of literature. This article systematically reviews the existing research, documenting its evolution and highlighting dominant and overlooked themes. We find a dramatic increase in the number of journal publications on this topic since 2008, the existence of thematic communities within the literature, and a focus on empirical work. We analysed keywords and abstracts to identify the broad boundaries of research on public procurement and innovation as well as particular areas of focus in the literature. We found a variety of terms used to describe the application of public procurement as an innovation policy tool and a variety of thematic interests and theoretical foundations. We argue that this makes it challenging to consolidate the research on the topic. From a policy perspective, the geographical context of research is overwhelmingly concentrated in OECD and EU countries.

There has been a diversification in the sources of university research funding in recent decades. While substantial research efforts have explored and discussed the implications of this diversification, with the exception of biomedical research the role of charities has typically been neglected, despite their importance in funding university research. This article explores the significance of charitable funding in academic research through the sponsorship of doctoral students. We demonstrate a sponsor classification strategy which classifies PhD theses by sponsor type with high accuracy and coverage. We find that: 1. charities play a significant role in funding doctoral students particularly within medical research, 2. charities are prominent in the wider network of research sponsors, and 3. they exhibit distinct preferences in terms of the subjects they fund. The dataset generated through this study provides an instrumental resource to initiate greater discussion on the role of this important source of research funding.

Although there exist several remarkable theories that facilitate the understanding of procurement risks in imperfect market conditions, methods to quantify the impact and identify the most severe risks are less well-known. This paper uses the method of risk analysis to discuss defence procurement challenges in India. An original dataset of 88 contracts has been created to identify the most probable and the most severe causes for poor procurement performance. A schedule performance parameter has been constructed to quantify the impact of different adverse events. The findings display a high probability of technological risks followed by contractual risks as the cause for delays in Indian defence procurement. Technological risks are concentrated in cases of indigenous procurement due to a lack of infrastructure and resources while contractual risks mostly occur in contracts where the Ministry of Defence deals with external agents like foreign suppliers. This indicates frictions and transaction costs. These and other findings from the quantitative data on procurement performance are supplemented by insights from an extensive fieldwork in India which included 53 interviews.

Megaprojects, due to their size, scale, and technical complexity are expensive and controversial, and how they proceed over time is a key topic of interest. This paper seeks to identify the issues surrounding changes in public opinion over time and discusses a larger question on whether such knowledge can be generalized across projects. An automated text analysis technique called 'sentiment analysis' has been used to plot trajectories for four UK megaprojects from newspaper articles. The empirical setting includes two military and two (civil) infrastructure projects, allowing the exploration of differences between the two fields as a secondary line of analysis.

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