Public R&D procurement: main factors of effectivness

The aim of the study is to analyze the existing problems in R&D procurement for the federal and municipal needs. The authors carried out a comparative analysis of the conducted surveys of the government customers and contractors representing research organizations and universities as well as of bidding documents and evaluation criteria for choosing the best offers in government procurement of social science research. The results of the study show that the currently applied approaches to the effectiveness evaluation of research organizations do not allow the selection of a duly qualified executor of a government order. A customer has to take decisions in conditions of high uncertainty both for the assessment of scientific capacity of a contractor and for the estimation of necessary resources to achieve the set goal. That makes the authors conclude that there is an urgent need in elaboration of alternative competitive criteria.