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This paper is part of the Compendium of Evidence on the Effectiveness of Innovation Policy Intervention. The paper reviews the literature that discusses the effects of policies which employ pre-commercial procurement to encourage and stimulate innovation. Precommercial is public procurement of research that will lead to innovation, and does not involve the purchase of a good or service that already exists. One of the best known precommercial approaches is the US SBIR Programme. In Europe, there is increasing interest in pre-commercial procurement approaches, but here, a different legal framework results in important differences in the way pre-commercial procurement can operate. The paper is in four main parts: a) firstly a short definition of pre-commercial procurement is offered, and an explanation is provided of the link between pre-commercial procurement and other demand side initiatives of which pre-commercial procurement can be considered an example; b) the reasons for using PCP are then considered, ie the justifications for this type of policy; c) then the forms affecting implementation are considered, paying close attention to the legal rules that define its application; d) evidence of impact is then considered in a section that looks very largely at the US implementation of the concept, the US SBIR; e) in section five, some general lessons and observations are provided. Annexes contain various reference materials including a bibliographic review of publications, and at a glance list of evaluations and the references.