Designing for Scale: Legal, Funding and Ecosystem Instruments for Port Innovation in Spain

Port authorities operate at the intersection of public policy, complex logistics, and rapid technological change. Innovation is widely recognized as essential for competitiveness and sustainability (Sooprayen et al., 2024; Sabino et al., 2025), yet moving from concept to implementation requires more than ambition; it depends on the mechanisms available to support adoption and scale. This study investigates what tools port authorities have at their disposal to materialize innovation and how these tools can be combined to create effective pathways from pilot projects to operational deployment. These questions frame the analysis and ensure a holistic understanding of the innovation landscape in the port sector. To address these questions, the study will identify the main instruments available to port authorities and examine how they can be leveraged to scale innovation. This includes procurement and funding mechanisms, and ecosystem approaches such as living labs, testbeds, and regulatory sandboxes that provide controlled environments for experimentation (Musso et al., 2022; Mendes Constante et al., 2023; Polydoropoulou et al., 2025). The analysis will be based on a structured review of legislation, policy guidance (Puertos del Estado, 2022), and sector programs (González-Cancelas et al., 2020; Orden TMA/702/2020), including Spain’s Public Sector Contracts Law (BOE-A-2017-12902) and its innovation-related provisions, and national PPI guidelines (BOE-A-2011-4117; BOE-A-2011-9617). The study will integrate illustrative scenarios to demonstrate how these instruments can function in combination in order to de-risk innovation and create pathways from pilot projects to operational deployment. The expected outcome is a comprehensive and structured map of the tools available to port authorities to enable innovation, highlighting not only complementarities and potential synergies but also structural gaps within the current ecosystem. These gaps may include coordination challenges between funding and procurement cycles, regulatory rigidities that limit scaling beyond experimental environments, and institutional barriers that hinder cross-organizational collaboration. By explicitly identifying such constraints, the study moves beyond a descriptive inventory of regulations and toward a strategic assessment of how the framework can evolve to better support systemic transformation. The contribution of this work lies in offering a practitioner-oriented roadmap for decision-makers. By consolidating the state of the art, the study will help port authorities design innovation strategies that are actionable, scalable, and aligned with long-term performance and sustainability objectives. Understanding these tools and their interplay is essential for ports seeking to deliver measurable improvements in efficiency, resilience, and environmental impact.