National Highways has announced that next week it will launch an open call to tackle key challenges that range from improving safety to creating a better customer experience.

From Monday, National Highways will run a five-week submissions invite under its Innovation and Research Designated Fund, giving people the opportunity to suggest innovative solutions to five specific challenges: improving customer experience of journey time, increasing safety on A-roads, reducing live traffic risks, maximising safety benefits while improving asset resilience and reducing occupational health risks for road workers.

Claire Hamar, head of innovation at National Highways, said: 'We want to be more transparent about the business challenges where innovation can have greatest impact. We are looking for ideas and solutions that make our roads safer for road users and workers. We also want to improve our customers experience. That's why we're inviting colleagues, suppliers, and other interested parties to help shape the future of our roads.'

National Highways said the open call will be 'a multi-phase process designed to support both opportunity identification and opportunity delivery'.

In the initial phase, ideas will be assessed against criteria then a pre-market engagement (PME) notice will be published via the Find a Tender Service.

The procurement route will then be determined based on the responses received. If only one viable response is identified, the opportunity may proceed via direct award but if multiple viable responses are received, the opportunity will be taken forward through a competitive tender process.

The Challenges

Challenge 1: Improving Customer Experience of Journey Time

National Highways said: 'We're looking for smart ideas to improve how we share information about delays, roadworks, and travel times. This challenge also focuses on reducing regular delays and congestion hotspots, cutting the time it takes to clear incidents, planning roadworks to cause less disruption, and using customer data to make travel smoother and more predictable.'

Challenge 2: Increase safety on A-roads

National Highways said: 'We're looking for ideas to improve safety on A-roads. This challenge is about reducing the number and severity of shunt collisions, cutting the risk of people being killed or seriously injured (KSI), and making both single and dual carriageway A-roads safer for all road users.

Challenge 3: Maximising safety benefits while improving resilience of our network assets 

National Highways said: 'We want solutions that help reduce the need for frequent renewals and keep both road users and workers safe. We're also looking for better asset data to plan costs and renewals over the long term, ways to make assets easier to access or reduce the need for on-site inspections, and a clearer understanding of how investment decisions affect safety and environmental outcomes.'

Challenge 4: Reducing risks of working next to live traffic 

National Highways said: 'This challenge is about finding solutions that remove the need for people to work in live traffic environments, reduce how often and how long workers are exposed to traffic, strengthen safer working practices in high-risk areas, and encourage safer behaviour from both road workers and road users.'

Challenge 5: Reducing occupational health risks

National Highways said: 'This challenge is about reducing long-term health problems, cutting the number of working days lost to illness, and improving how we identify and manage key health risks. We also want to see more use of preventative hygiene practices and make sure health risk elimination and safer alternatives are built into design and planning from the start.'

Visit the National Highways website for full details of the challenges and how to apply.