Article 5 — Economic operators
In brief
This article protects participation in R&D procurement irrespective of an operator’s legal form. Public buyers cannot require a specific legal form to take part, and operators entitled to provide the relevant R&D services under the law of their home Member State cannot be rejected merely because the awarding Member State would have required them to be a natural or a legal person. Buyers may, in defined cases, ask legal persons to identify the staff responsible for performing the contract.
Key points
- No specific legal form may be required to participate in an R&D procurement procedure.
- Operators lawfully entitled to provide the services in their home Member State cannot be rejected solely on natural-versus-legal-person grounds.
- For R&D services, works, or siting and installation operations, buyers may require legal persons to name the staff and relevant qualifications before execution begins.
What it means in practice
This provision lowers barriers for a wide range of participants, including consortia, researchers and smaller entities that may not fit a particular corporate form. Public buyers should frame eligibility around capability rather than legal form, while retaining the ability to ask for the names and qualifications of key staff in the specified situations.
Official text — Article 5 (COM(2026) 567)
Source: European Commission, proposal for a Regulation establishing the European Innovation Act, COM(2026) 567 final, 9 September 2026. Read the official proposal (PDF). Text may change during the legislative process.
Anthony Bochon’s analysis
This provision is squarely pro-access, and I welcome it. By barring buyers from imposing a specific legal form and protecting operators lawfully entitled to provide the services in their home Member State, the article removes exactly the kind of formalistic barrier that has historically shut smaller and cross-border research actors out of public tenders. My reading is that it operationalises the internal-market freedoms — freedom to provide services and of establishment — inside the procurement procedure itself, rather than leaving them to be vindicated after the fact.
The counterweight, in paragraph 3, is the buyer’s ability to require the names and qualifications of key staff for the tasks concerned. In practice that is where the real assurance of capability sits for research contracts, and I would advise buyers to use it precisely and proportionately, since demanding named personnel can otherwise become a back-door constraint on the very openness the article is meant to secure.