Managing Competition Among Suppliers To The IAEA

The IAEA uses a wide variety of equipment for safeguards activities. This equipment utilizes many diverse technologies, some with very wide and some with very narrow applicability elsewhere. The result of developing equipment with specialized applicability is that developers are often unable to transfer the technology outside the relatively small IAEA market. Development of new generations of equipment is often sponsored using limited extra-budgetary funding. Therefore, the Agency must be selective in initiating large development projects. Finally, there are few developers able to direct their resources on meeting the stringent requirements of the IAEA under these commercial constraints. Effective management of competition among developers is challenging. The IAEA must balance the need to nurture developers as a resource against meeting its development requirements within its budget realities. The IAEA must manage development so that it benefits from competition while recognizing the limitations of the commercial benefits it can offer to developers. This paper will consider several models for managing competition and evaluate them against the IAEA;s constraints.