Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ILEAnet (Innovation by Law Enforcement Agencies networking)

Teaser

ILEAnet (Innovation by Law Enforcement Agencies networking) is a 5-year Coordination and Support action project in the field of Security, launched in June 2017 and gathering 21 partners. The ILEAnet project aims to set up and develop a sustainable network of Law Enforcement...

Summary

ILEAnet (Innovation by Law Enforcement Agencies networking) is a 5-year Coordination and Support action project in the field of Security, launched in June 2017 and gathering 21 partners.
The ILEAnet project aims to set up and develop a sustainable network of Law Enforcement Agency (LEA) practitioner organisations from all over Europe together with a community of people interested in exchanging and collaborating with respect to LEA challenges and needs and LEA-centred RDI. The mission of this network+community is to stimulate LEA capabilities to influence, develop and take up research, development and innovation (RDI) that is useful and usable for LEAs, and thereby help them to tackle the major challenges they face.
The network is organised around ILEAnet National Contacts (INCs) who are in charge of federating the networks of practitioners, policy makers, academics, industrial players and other RDI stakeholders in their respective countries.
Whilst the organisational ILEAnet network is focused – “top-down” - on specific challenges, the ILEAnet community of people contributes via “bottom-up” ideas to produce innovative approaches to face newly arising challenges. The ILEAnet Online Platform enables professional social networking and mutual online assistance related to new solutions and best practice to address LEA challenges.
By synthesising top-down approaches and bottom-up ideas in iterative processes involving surveys, discussions, polls, brainstorming, etc., ILEAnet will, in the near future, build up a broad portfolio of RDI results and new RDI project concepts and will deliver recommendations for future RDI policies. Ultimately, ILEAnet will catalyse innovation between LEAs and between LEAs, academics and industry. This will enable LEAs not only to take up mature results but also to prepare and influence future RDI efforts which could be taken up by individual or groupings of organisations and countries as well as by European research funding programmes.

Work performed

ILEAnet is organised in a total of six Work Packages, as defined below:
WP1 – ILEAnet networking – is in charge of providing the resources to and input from INCs and their respective national networks of practitioners, academia, industry and other stakeholders.
In the first period, WP1 set up the final list of the INCs. The main achievements of the INCs include inviting new members to the ILEAnet Online Platform, counting now 168 members and encouraging them to participate to the activities initiated by the consortium.
WP2 – Law Enforcement Challenges & Needs – is responsible for enabling and crystallizing the expression of challenges and needs by the LEA practitioners. WP2 aims to develop the strategy for collecting and analysing the practitioner needs via two ways: a top-down approach (suggestion of the topics based on the analysis of policy documents and strategic research agendas) and a bottom-up approach by collecting input from the ILEAnet Network+Community. Four questionnaires were elaborated based on the reviews of policy documents on the following topics: migration, terrorism, organized crime and cybercrime. These surveys were distributed to the INCs who shared them in their national networks, for which more than 100 answers were collected. The bottom-up approach was ensured by observing the activity in the ILEAnet Online Platform, detecting any important question to be considered.
WP3 – ILEAnet Knowledge Factory – is in charge of collecting the Knowledge generated on the ILEAnet Online Platform through identification of available expertise, best practices and RDI results, and making it available to the entire community. In the first period, the work in WP3 was dedicated to the development and improvement of the online members profiles, together with the creation of the Knowledge Factory Database collecting the “knowledge” from the community members.
WP4 – ILEAnet Scouting activities – focuses on the analyses of the gaps and opportunities proposed by WP3 and the preparation of the future to enable solutions to the identified challenges and needs that cannot be resolved by WP3.The main work undertaken during the first Annual Cycle was related to the preparatory work for the regular ILEAnet cycles through the elaboration of documents such as the feasibility study questionnaire and the security research questionnaire.
WP5 – Community Platform Administration, Public Workshops and Dissemination – established a dissemination strategy, created a public project website, set up and maintained the ILEAnet Online Platform. A successful workshop was organised at the end of the first period gathering 60 active participants.
WP6 – Governance, Coordination & Sustainability – provides the project management infrastructure to ensure the efficient coordination of the project and to monitor the respect of all contractual obligations.

Final results

During this first period, ILEAnet took the first steps towards achieving the overarching impacts and laid down solid foundations for the future Annual Cycles:

Improving innovation capacity and the integration of knowledge
The ILEAnet “Network+Community” (a Network of LEA practitioner organisations and a Community of people interested in LEA innovation) is set-up and its members are growing continuously. The Network+Community is showing good cooperation and mutual understanding of the importance to define the LEA-related challenges and needs, to start working on the emerged priorities and to find a way to uptake existing innovative solutions.
The 18 ILEAnet National Contacts represent the cornerstone of ILEAnet, enabling the enlargement of the Network+Community.
The ILEAnet Online Platform provides a web space allowing the LEAs and academics to exchange in dedicated groups. The integration of new knowledge is done through different means: a “discussion” in a specific group or a “knowledge” in the Knowledge Factory gathering information or results in a more structured form.
These foundations will facilitate the project’s progress during the next Annual Cycles: to prioritize the challenges and needs defined in Period 1;to identify existing innovation opportunities or gaps; and thus to explore new concepts.

Impact on European research
The bottom-up approach, identification of challenges ad needs by the practitioners, in addition to the existing top-down approach, ideas identified by the European and National policies is of a great importance to a LEA-driven innovation in research programmes related to societal security.
In the first Period, ILEAnet was represented at the Community of Users events in Brussels with the aim to share its experience, enrich its network and participate in the definition of the research and innovation needs in the security field. Such collaboration facilitated the relations between ILEAnet and some RDI projects, especially in the area of Community Policing.
The objectives for the Second Annual Cycle are to continue networking with stakeholders and engaging with related projects with the aim to create the ILEAnet Project Portfolio (a database on the existing RDI projects and concepts), to launch new collaborative undertakings and start delivering recommendations for future RDI policies.

Impact on European economy and competitiveness
One of the next important steps will be to invite industry representatives to join the ILEAnet Online Platform and to discuss specific needs for innovation in dedicated discussion groups.

Website & more info

More info: https://www.ileanet.eu/.