Public procurement has a high but unmet potential for meeting environmental policy goals and delivering public value through public-private co-creation. To buy new environmental solutions, the procurer needs to access knowledge about needs from users and knowledge about solutions from suppliers. The procurer combines this knowledge to find a new need-solution pair, or a new innovation. We find that this is challenging due to a gap between public needs and supplier solutions, with the public procurer in the middle. We use a qualitative approach to unpack this gap. Our findings center around the distance to knowledge about public needs and private solutions that internal and external organizational boundaries create. Our paper adds value by unpacking the nature of this distance in need-solution pairing. We thereby contribute to the literature on innovation management in environments in which both internal and external organizational boundaries need to be bridged.
