Innovation? No way! – Procurement specialists in most cases shy away from innovation. Politicians however are keen on the word “innovation”, it sounds very positive. So what about a policy initiative which openly calls for innovative market solutions? Can public procurement serve as a tool to get the market involved with innovation? Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch Directorate-General for Public Works and Water Management for instance is explicitly calling for innovative solutions by means of public procurement.

The Rijkswaterstaat Centre for Transport and Navigation has established innovation programmes which aim at developing innovative strategies to radically improve mobility. With the help of those innovation programmes, the Centre of Excellence gathers knowledge and insights from the market. In cooperation with the market, the innovative ideas are subsequently being tested as pilots.

Public procurement is an integral part of those innovation programmes. The approach of Rijkswaterstaat Centre for Transport and Navigation regarding procurement in this context is a prize contest in a 3-step approach : The fist phase is called the “idea”-phase and is the actual procurement phase. After an assessment of the (anonymous) proposal by an independent jury, the selected companies will receive a budget to develop the idea into a fully fledged design. After a new assessment of the designs and in case the developed project fulfils the requirements, the procuring agency may decide to go ahead with a practical trial and to monitor the results. This phase is optional and will be decided on by Rijkswaterstaat at the end of the development phase. Below, we present a prize contest in the framework of one of those innovation programmes which featured standards as a tool to measure innovation. 

The prize contest modulair wegdek (modular paving) is a pilot project of Rijkswater-staat in the framework of the Roads to the future project. Roads to the future is searching for long-term perspectives to radically improve mobility, one of the main themes of this programme being innovative road surfaces. Modular paving is a ready for use paving which is produced at a factory and can be installed, removed and replaced if necessary. Modular paving can be considered as the way of construction and maintenance of the future. The innovative elements of modular paving are the easy and quick constructing, removal and replacement of bad parts without being dependent of weather circumstances. Additionally, modular construction can prevent traffic obstructions and offers the possibility to add – in a flexible way – functions to the road surface. Finally, the quality of this kind of paving is controllable due to its fabrication in a factory.

1 Depending on the subject and the market, Rijkswaterstaat may decide to go ahead with a 2-step approach.

The question of this prize contest was therefore to offer a proposal for

• a modular paving,
• which can be prefabricated,
• fulfils the technical requirements (such as safety – measured e.g. by braking distance – and sustainability requirements) and
• has the explicit function of noise reduction.

Rijkswaterstaat received 15 proposals from 13 companies. They decided to select 4 proposals to continue with in the final trial phase. Modieslab, which consists of concrete prefabricated modules, did score very well in this phase in the light of the innovative requirements. The paving is very well suited for easy and quick constructing, removal and replacement and can especially be used in marshy undergrounds (due to its construction on head beams). Furthermore, it scored very well with regards the noise reduction criteria.

It is obvious that the innovation criterion figured prominent in the tender document; after all, the explicit request was actually to design a new type of paving. But so did standards. The use of standards was a topic in this procurement, says Rita Blijdorp, procurement officer at Rijkswaterstaat Centre for Transport and Navigation. “When buying innovation, you need a tool to measure if this innovation fulfils the requirements.” In this prize contest for instance, the contracting authority used the standard ISO 11819-1 for the measurement of the influence of road surfaces on traffic noise and ISO 13473-3 for the characterization of pavement texture by use of surface pro-files. Standards like those “guarantee certain minimum demands which the modular paving had to fulfil” says Rita Blijdorp.

Modieslab is currently being tested in real life situations. A strip of this modular paving has been included in a newly built motorway section at one of the Netherlands most frequented motorway junctions. After modieslab, Rijkswaterstaat continued giving incentives to develop innovative products which may help improve mobility issues. Currently, trees and bushes are being planted in the Arnhem region to test their influence on the improvement of the air quality at motorways.