Infrastructure Ventures
Oct 25, 2021
InfrastructureVentures.com highlights digital revolution to build faster, better, smarter
WASHINGTON, D.C. – As the effort to pass historic infrastructure funding continues in Congress, Infrastructure Ventures today launched a new website focused on the future. The IV mission is to work with private sector innovators and public infrastructure owners to help accelerate the transformation in our current focus areas of innovation: comprehensive digital project delivery and longer lasting and more sustainable bridge structures in the transportation infrastructure sector.
Our current spotlight in the sustainable structures area are bridge systems using lightweight composite materials that are as strong, longer lasting and require less maintenance than traditional materials.
Together with its sponsors and partners in composite bridge structures, e-ticketing and digital project delivery, Infrastructure Ventures aims to raise awareness among policymakers, practitioners, and the public about the critical need to readily available and transformational digital construction technologies in the transportation infrastructure sector - we can achieve state of practice in digital project delivery within the life of the next federal surface transportation act, likely to be five years. The Federal Highway Administration’s inclusion of e-Ticketing and Digital as-builts in the latest round of Every Day Counts innovation initiatives provides a national rallying cry to make it happen.
“Advances in technology are the key to building back better, but also faster and smarter, getting more bang for our bucks,” said Gregory Nadeau, founder and chairman of Infrastructure Ventures. “Innovation requires commitment and effort. Policy leaders must support their front-line innovators as they work to pursue the use of new technologies and practices in project delivery and more sustainable structures. There are champions of change on the front lines of every state DOT in the nation.”
Nadeau, a former Federal Highway Administrator in the Obama-Biden Administration, founded Infrastructure Ventures four years ago with the goal of targeting certain innovations for advancement in collaboration with its sponsors and advisors.
IV’s board of advisors include nationally recognized experts in the transportation sector including former Deputy Secretary of Transportation Victor Mendez, former U.S. Maritime Administrator David Matsuda, and former Illinois Secretary of Transportation Dr. Ann Schneider. Kempton Strategies is IV’s strategic partner in California and its president, Mark Kempton, along with Will Kempton, former Director of CalTrans and other major leadership roles during his storied career, also serve on the IV Board of Advisors.
IV partners and sponsors include companies at the cutting edge of the digital construction transformation including Trimble Inc., a leader in connected construction and a provider of advanced digital construction equipment and software that accelerates project delivery; and Haul Hub Technologies, whose e-ticketing software streamlines the construction materials supply chain delivery system and virtually eliminates paper record keeping and processes.
Another IV partner is AIT Bridges, a division of Advanced Infrastructure Technologies of Brewer, Maine, the leading producer of innovative composite vehicle bridge solutions. Most recently, the company delivered the first composite arch bridge system to the West Coast, on SR 203 in Duvall, Washington.
IV is also managing the recently announced National Construction Materials e-Ticketing Task Force with participants and members from Maine to California. IV Chairman Nadeau serves senior advisor to the Task Force.
IV’s website details how new technologies are achieving real results by producing high-quality, sustainable transportation infrastructure projects. The website also features a special whitepaper that explains how this once-in-a-generation opportunity for federal and state leadership can accelerate the transformation of the nation’s public infrastructure agencies responsible for delivering projects in an integrated digital world. IV Productions has also produced two new InfoDoc videos, that explains the composite bridge story and e-ticketing.
In addition, plans are underway to launch an accompanying podcast and media platform called InfraTalk America that will feature conversations with leading experts and influencers in the transportation and infrastructure sectors.
“The state of our infrastructure affects everyone and every sector of our economy,” said Nadeau. “Infrastructure Ventures and its sponsors and partners are committed to providing a platform that will become a reliable and useful source of truth about our targeted focus areas of innovation for policy-makers and the public.