CALL FOR INNOVATION CASE STUDY
City of Alexandria Accelerates Smart Roadways Innovation
Through the CFI that the Marketplace.city team helped create and shared, the City of Alexandria received 24 submissions. From the start of CFI creation to the final decision-making process, the timeline was two months. Marketplace.city turned around, organized and structured data, in 48 hours, expediting the data review and selection process, and the city selected 4 vendors for deployment.
AT-A-GLANCE
- Location: Alexandria, VA
- Government Type: Municipality
- Population: 159,000
- Buyer: Alexandria’s Department of Transportation
- Key parties: Marketplace.city, Alexandria DOT, Virginia Tech,
- Transportation Institute, Kimley Horn and Associates
- (partnership w/ Alexandria for SMART grant)
THE CHALLENGE
Advancing Innovation and Modernizing Pavement Assessment
The City of Alexandria is committed to advancing innovation in how it plans, maintains, and improves public infrastructure. As part of its participation in the U.S. Department of Transportation's SMART Grant Program, the City saw an opportunity to accelerate a full-scale technology initiative.
Alexandria aimed to test high-resolution pavement and asset assessment tools to improve maintenance planning and long-term infrastructure strategy. By modernizing how roadway conditions were evaluated and recorded, the City sought to strengthen pavement and asset management practices and enhance mobility for residents across the community.
THE SOLUTION
Streamlining Vendor Discovery and Evaluation
To move quickly and comprehensively, the City partnered with Marketplace.city to launch a targeted Call for Innovation. Leveraging Marketplace.city’s standardized data structure and broad vendor network, Alexandria was able to reach a wide spectrum of providers; ensuring emerging startups and niche innovators were evaluated alongside established industry leaders.
Equally important was speed. Marketplace.city aggregated and structured vendor submissions in a consistent format, enabling the City to review and compare solutions efficiently and accelerate its evaluation and selection process.
“As a local government deploying emerging mobility technologies, we don’t always have the internal capacity to run open innovation processes at scale. Marketplace.city gave us a structured, defensible framework to launch our US DOT SMART Grant Call for Innovation, streamline vendor discovery, and evaluate proposals side-by-side with clarity and confidence. It reduced administrative burden, expanded our access to high-quality vendors, and significantly accelerated our decision timeline—allowing us to focus on outcomes instead of process.” - Hillary Orr, Deputy Director of Transportation and Enviromental Services
THE OUTCOME
Two Months to Deployment: Dramatically Accelerating Innovation
The targeted Call for Innovation generated 24 high-quality vendor responses, which were structured and returned to the City in less than 48 hours.
In collaboration with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute and the consultant team, Alexandria evaluated precise data collection criteria, narrowed the field to seven finalists for interviews, and selected four solutions for deployment.
From opportunity creation to deployment selection, the City completed the entire process in just two months, dramatically accelerating its innovation timeline and advancing smarter, data-driven roadway management.
