Challenge-led approach
The purpose of the Innovation and Research theme within Designated Funds is to explore priority business challenges that will help us ensure the road network of tomorrow while creating efficiencies and value for money.
Our new challenge-led approach will set a clear direction for programme development and investment. By building a pipeline of challenges, we foster collaboration across National Highways and with the wider industry. Through this model, we ensure that innovation efforts are purposeful, measurable and strategically aligned with our long-term ambitions, resulting in a balanced, focused, and high-impact programme.
The Innovation and Research theme is designed to contribute to the delivery of our corporate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Performance Indicators (PIs), as set out in the Strategic Business Plan.
Due to the broad and cross-cutting nature of innovation, Innovation and Research has the potential to support progress across several corporate KPIs and PIs. Its flexibility allows it to address a wide range of business challenges, enabling targeted interventions that align with long-term ambitions and performance commitments.
As new priority challenges are identified through our challenge-led approach, the specific KPIs and PIs that innovation and research contribute to will evolve. This ensures our programme remains agile, responsive to change, and aligned with the outcomes that matter most to us and our stakeholders.
The challenge-led approach:
- aligns innovation and research with our long-term strategy
- sets top-down direction for programme development and investment
- identifies business challenges that must be solved or realised to reach strategic ambitions (where solutions are unknown)
- builds a pipeline of prioritised business challenges
- funds innovation and research to solve prioritised business challenges
- sends a signal to industry, external stakeholders and other interested parties
- enables collaboration to solve cross-cutting challenges
- establishes measures of success through granular statements that enable the right programme of projects to be identified and prioritised
Guidance
For more information about our challenge-led approach and open calls for project ideas, please visit our Innovation and Research Designated Fund - Guidance 2025 page.
Open call 2025
Find out more about the Open call 2025 challenges that will shape our next programme.
Webinars
Introducing National Highways’ Innovation and Research Challenge-Led Approach webinar
Claire Hamar, our Head of Innovation, discussed the new challenge-led approach and what it entails during a webinar Tuesday 7 October 2025. Watch the recording of the webinar.
Open call 2025 webinar
We're hosting an Open call, seeking innovative solutions from the wider industry to the challenges we face making our roads as safe as possible for road users and workers and improving our customers’ experience.
This Open call aims to build the Year 1 programme of our Innovation and Research Designated Funds for the third Road Investment Strategy period (RIS3). Get more information about our Open call.
Applicants can submit their ideas from Monday 3 November 2025 until the Open call closes on Monday 8 December 2025.
Claire Hamar hosted this webinar at 11am on Tuesday 21 October 2025 - watch a recording of the Open call webinar here.
Webinar Q&As
Throughout our webinars we promoted the use of the Q&A function and received a number of questions. These questions were either answered during the webinar by a member of the team or shortly after the webinar concluded. View the questions and their respective answers.
