The article presents the structure and approach, adopted by the Highway Innovative Technology Evaluation Centre (HITEC) in the USA, to encourage innovation in the highway market. In 1993, the Civil Engineering Research Foundation (CERF) surveyed the highway community, to study the market's barriers and the public sector's interest in breaking down obstacles to introducing and accepting new products. It discovered that the most common obstacles, preventing public sector agencies from accepting new highway products, included: (1) procurement systems based on prescriptive standards and specifications; (2) regulatory constraints on the use of proprietary products; and (3) evaluation processes that take too long. HITEC opened in January 1994 as a new service centre to evaluate market-ready highway and bridge products. It uses a consensus-based product evaluation process, designed to overcome many barriers before they can hinder a product's market introduction. This process is broad enough to allow the evaluation of a wide variety of technologies, from US and international sources.
Samenvatting