Despite the prevailing view in the studies on public private partnerships (PPPs) on the potentiality of PPP models for stimulating innovation, existing studies fail to provide a full understating of the relationship between PPP characteristics and innovation, namely they do not explain whether and to what extent some characteristics of PPP are more likely to foster innovation rather than others. This paper aims at providing answers to the following key research questions: Which are the PPP features that favour innovation? How should a PPP be properly structured in order to foster innovation? With this aim, drawing upon the main streams of studies on innovation, we develop a conceptual framework on the relationship between PPP and innovation and formulate the research hypotheses. An econometric analysis is then applied to empirically test the hypotheses using a dataset of 290 PPP projects spanning different countries and sectors, extracted by the World Bank PPI Database. Findings reveal that the arrangement of PPP projects; the market, contract and network structure, as well as government supports, may affect innovation. These results provide foundations to elaborate managerial implications for the future implementation of PPP projects, showing how PPP features have to be structured in order to foster innovation.

This paper deals with the topic of risk management in Public Private Partnership (PPP). The analysis of the related literature reveals that risks must be analyzed and managed on a context-specific approach, and that there is a lack of a comprehensive study on the appropriate risk mitigation strategies for each risk embedded in PPP projects. Focusing on the transport sector, based on the results of a Delphi survey, the paper provides guidelines for both public and private parties in defining a list of significant risks in PPP motorway projects, and identifying for them both the effective allocation and the suitable mitigation strategies. Results of the Delphi survey have been compared with the common practices on risk management applied in eight real motorway PPP projects.