This article describes a Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) program that is helping highway industry innovations make the leap from promising prototypes to market-ready products. The Technology Partnerships Program provides grants to fund the critical final steps in developing technologies with potential to improve project or work zone safety, accelerate construction, reduce construction-related congestion, or improve quality. The program, established in 2007, also promotes partnerships to test and demonstrate those technologies in real-world settings. The grants enable companies to adapt nonhighway-related innovations to highway use or refine existing equipment, materials, or processes that are not common practice in the transportation industry. The Technology Partnerships Program is part of Highways for LIFE, an FHWA initiative to accelerate innovation in the highway industry. So far, FHWA has awarded Technology Partnerships grants of $200,000 to $500,000 to five companies to refine and evaluate prototype technologies. The projects include an all-weather pavement marking system for work zones, an intelligent asphalt compaction analyzer, an aggregate imaging system, an automated pavement marker placement system, and an asphalt binder cracking device. FHWA plans to announce the recipients of a second round of Technology Partnerships grants in spring 2009.
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