National Highways Innovation Management System

Supporting National Highways to scale up innovation delivery

National Highways’ ambition to strengthen innovation capabilities and achieve long-term improvements has been underpinned by Mott MacDonald working to embed an innovation management strategy. This initiative, aligned with international standards, will help National Highways meet commitments made in its innovation and research strategy.

Overcoming innovation delivery challenges

National Highways has a strong reputation for innovation but wanted to enhance its efforts, particularly in scaling up the delivery of innovative ideas. To achieve this, an innovation management system was needed to transition from short-term projects, which lacked performance tracking and synergy application, to sustainable, large-scale innovation.

National Highways set out an ambition to invest in innovation and research as part of its second five-year Road Investment Strategy (RIS2), which runs until 2025. This investment aims to transform the industry by digitising construction, decarbonising transport and utilising data to provide bespoke services to customers. As a result, National Highways can achieve cheaper, faster construction and connected journeys while meeting net zero carbon and environmental commitments.

WSP was appointed by National Highways to support and advise on delivery of its net zero carbon commitments. WSP working in partnership with Mott MacDonald with their innovation expertise supported the implementation of the innovation management system. Our knowledge of the standard was essential to ensure the plan put in place met international standards, while also enhancing prioritisation and tracking of innovation and investment initiatives.

National Highways putting innovation systems to the test

Starting in 2021, Mott MacDonald supported National Highways to improve overall innovation management maturity, accelerate progressing innovation initiatives to scaled solutions, and manage innovation investments more systematically. The ISO 56002 series has been used to guide in this process over three phases.

During phase one, Mott MacDonald evaluated National Highways’ existing innovation processes and performed a root cause analysis which identified key challenges to scale up innovation. Importance of managing initiatives through innovation portfolio management approach was highlighted and foundations were set.

This included setting tactical objectives for each innovation priority area to help begin assessing initiatives in standardised and fair manner, while also achieving a balanced portfolio of initiatives for different challenges, ambitions and risk factors. Managing initiatives through an innovation portfolio management approach is important to ensure standardised and fair assessment of initiatives, aligning them with tactical objectives, achieving a balanced portfolio that addresses different challenges, ambitions, and risk factors.

During phase two, we further defined tactical objectives and started developing guidance and templates to measure innovation efforts and progress initiatives through deployment at scale. As part of this phase, following outputs were created:

• Metrics for each innovation objective to help National Highways measure progress in developing a diverse portfolio of initiatives, progressing those initiatives and fostering internal and external engagement and collaboration.
• First iteration of an innovation scorecard to assess the overall readiness levels of initiatives across key decision-making points.
• Drafting guidance for innovation project owners to progress ideas through various innovation pathways.

During phase three, the focus was implementing the previously recommended changes and core tools, as well as carrying out overall maturity assessment to inform further improvement points in National Highway’s third Road Investment Strategy (RIS3), which starts in April 2025 and run through to 2030. This was achieved through looking at innovation maturity, funding and management.

Innovation maturity and funding options included development and implementation of repeatable maturity assessments based on the ISO 56002 innovation management framework, through in-depth interviews and a survey.

This resulted in baseline maturity scores across each element of the framework and identification of strengths and weaknesses. As the assessment is repeatable, it provided National Highways with a tool to continue using over time to measure progress continue improving its overall maturity. Additionally, alternative funding options available for National Highways were evaluated to utilise external partnerships and mechanisms for further improving overall innovation capability.

Innovation management started with development of an innovation delivery mechanisms tool that can be used to assess appropriate mechanism to solve innovation challenges in RIS3. The innovation scorecard was further trialled with key stakeholders and iterated into a final for embedment into decision making governance processes. Also, an interactive innovation activity library was developed which includes suggested activities and resources for each stage of the innovation journey from initial ideation through to deployment at scale.

Across all three phases particular attention was given to knowledge transfer sessions to continuously pass relevant insights to National Highways’ team to ensure deliverables and outputs are effectively embedded. These sessions consisted in topics such as the ISO 56000 series, idea management systems, metrics, business model canvas and the amplify systematic innovation management training programme.

The project team brought in new ideas and ways of thinking about innovation management into National Highways, such as innovation maturity assessment and scorecard. The work done on validating the tools created was extremely valuable in helping our staff understand the processes involved in scaling up innovations. It was also undertaken to a tight timescale.

Melissa Giusti

Principal innovation advisor, National Highways

The solution to innovation delivery

Over the three phases, the following results were achieved:

• Clear baseline of organisational innovation maturity, with capability gaps, and action plan to improve overtime
• Evaluation and prioritisation of alternative funding routes to meet the needs of delivering RIS3 and 2050 vision
• Discovery of different innovation mechanisms to solve innovation challenges, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each
• Definition of common innovation pathway (end-to-end process), and provision of an easy to understand guidance for project sponsors on what is expected at each stage
• Implementation of an innovation scorecard for use at key decision points. 

These tools and mechanisms have helped National Highways to strengthen its overall innovation capability, streamline and accelerate processes to progress innovation initiatives, improve monitoring and assessment of innovation with a systematic approach and maximise investment value from the National Highways Designation Fund for innovation and modernisation.