As far as I know, most EU lobbyist have established a role as a representative for a particular group and the lazy politicians just ask them what they believe would be a good decision/law/etc. In most cases there's no one to argue the opposite and if there is, the lobbyist make sure they have good "facts" to make sure their view will seem as most trustworthy. Of course there's probably a lot of fancy dinners and such (ie bribes) to get to that position.

Perhaps the lack of out-of-the-box thinking in public sector is because it's not a wide spread practice and you have to fight a lot of bureaucracy for these kind of projects. Also it might be hard to fund a project without any guarantees of success, as compared to buying proprietary sofware x with a huge spec list.