THE CHALLENGE

The scale and pace of crises pose enormous challenges for the Crisis Management sector, with new threats emerging all the time. An already complex field must also strive to integrate new technologies and methods, cope with a rapidly changing infrastructure, understand evolving risks, be effective across cultural, administrative and national boundaries and engage with populations to enhance their resilience.

Innovation is therefore critical, but will only be successful if it is relevant and accessible to practitioners and operators. Many crises involve interfacing diverse Crisis Management systems and solutions. Major crises can also frequently involve more than one country or region, which may have differing Crisis Management infrastructures and cultures. It is also highly likely that this will necessitate interfacing different systems and combining different solutions.

Crisis Management innovation must therefore be capable of meeting these multifaceted challenges and delivering solutions that are modular, flexible and adaptable.

These solutions must be tested and validated in realistic environments; they must be evaluated to assess their true benefits and for their overall suitability, before being adopted by end-users. Failure to meet these needs could result in less than perfect solutions being introduced or in the increased costs of Crisis Management capability development, due to the imperfect management of ever more complex crises.

THE PROJECT

Driver+ copes with current and future challenges due to increasingly severe consequences of natural disasters and terrorist threats, by the development and uptake of innovative solution that are addressing the operational needs of practitioners dealing with Crisis Management. Project Driver+ launched in May 2014 and was funded under the 7^th Framework Programme of the European Commission. The AIT is the lead of Portfolio of Solutions.

DRIVER+ is a significant Pan-European effort to accelerate innovation in Crisis Management. To this end, the project has created a set of sustainable outputs for crisis management stakeholders.