Development of an implementation infrastructure to support a traffic safety culture.

There are successful strategies to increase the potential of producing benefits from research activities. These strategies streamline the adoption of new methods, processes, or technologies, create a more effective return on investment of research funds, and enable a more rapid application of worthy improvements to the system. However, implementation of research results and innovations do not happen automatically. Purposeful effort must be taken to facilitate the implementation of research results to realize the anticipated benefits of the research activities. Because there are successful strategies that will increase the potential to affect change in the current culture for traffic safety, the primary purposes of this paper are to (1) focus attention on the critical role of implementation of beneficial research results, (2) facilitate the process of implementation by suggesting the creation of a traffic safety implementation infrastructure, and (3) firmly place the activities of implementation in the position of being entirely merged with the work of research. The overarching outcome is to assure that productive research results are integrated into operations as a viable and even preferred choice to support decision making and for accomplishing specific tasks. Taken as a whole, the variety of successful implementation strategies forms an implementation infrastructure. The infrastructure has five basic elements - Technology (the research results to be implemented), People, Marketing and Communications, and Implementation Tools, plus Levers that increase the effectiveness of the other four elements. This infrastructure presents a systematic approach to accomplishing implementation of research results. This systematic approach--applying the strategies of an implementation infrastructure--can and should be incorporated into the research activities being performed to enhance the traffic safety culture. If the members of the traffic safety community, particularly the sponsors and those vested in the results of research, use strategies for successful implementation, these actions will corporately build a traffic safety implementation infrastructure. The implementation infrastructure will more effectively enable the institutionalization of positive change and adoption of new behaviors, products, methods, and practices within the traffic safety community and among transportation users of this nation.