From Moonshots to main streets - enabling innovation across a network

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National Highways has the funding and organisational scale to invest in genuinely transformative inspection technologies, including muon-based scanning and other advanced non-destructive methods that reveal the internal behaviour of structures in ways conventional inspection simply cannot. It also raises an uncomfortable question for the network as a whole: local authorities manage some 72,000–73,000 road bridges across Great Britain, often with far more constrained budgets and smaller technical teams. The innovations being pioneered at the top of the system are not automatically accessible to the authorities responsible for the majority of it. This session explores that gap directly. Colin George sets out what the moonshot approach has made possible at National Highways, and the discussion turns to how that innovation can be championed, adapted, and made accessible for smaller and less well-resourced authorities. What would it take to make technologies like muon scanning genuinely available across the network? And what is the sector's collective responsibility to ensure that innovation doesn't only flow to those who can already afford it?

What you will takeaway from this session:

National Highways has the funding and organisational scale to invest in genuinely transformative inspection technologies, including muon-based scanning and other advanced non-destructive methods that reveal the internal behaviour of structures in ways conventional inspection simply cannot. It also raises an uncomfortable question for the network as a whole: local authorities manage some 72,000–73,000 road bridges across Great Britain, often with far more constrained budgets and smaller technical teams. The innovations being pioneered at the top of the system are not automatically accessible to the authorities responsible for the majority of it. This session explores that gap directly. Colin George sets out what the moonshot approach has made possible at National Highways, and the discussion turns to how that innovation can be championed, adapted, and made accessible for smaller and less well-resourced authorities. What would it take to make technologies like muon scanning genuinely available across the network? And what is the sector's collective responsibility to ensure that innovation doesn't only flow to those who can already afford it?

Speaker
Deputy Head of Structures
National Highways