Invitation to join our pre-proposal research for "ACT-FASTER! Establish, Enable and Accelerate the Diffusion of an Innovative “Hybrid Human-Technology Blockchain” Cyber Safety Solution.

Dear all - we are now nearing completion of the questionnaire to support the Excellence Section of our proposal. Please find the invitation and introduction to the first section below. 

If you are interested in supporting the survey, and thus joining the consortium for the proposal, please reach out and contact oliver.schwabe@innovation-web.eu to discuss the best way forward. If you are not member of a municipality / city (and hence a potential interviewee) you will need to "bring along" such an interviewee in order to participate.  

All members of the future consortium (who do not work for a municipality / city) will also need to assume responsibility for running 3-5 interviews (90 minutes each) with members of municipalities / cities within a 4 week period.

Besides being the foundation for the proposal, the interview results will be consolidated in a journal paper submission.

Please contact me by end of day Friday 20 November if you wish to participate in the proposal. Later requests will be added to a "waiting list". Do hurry - we are filling up fast and wish to keep the number of consortium members not coming from a municipality / city to a maximum of 10.

** Invitation to Members of City Administrations (Globally) to join the (upcoming) Horizon / Digital Europe Proposal ** “ACT-FASTER!” for Accelerating the Diffusion of Cyber Safety Solutions in our Cities.

The Open European Network for Enterprise Innovation  in collaboration with Major Cities Europe, the Smart Cities Institute (Israel), the Innovation Value Institute at Maynooth University (Ireland), VTT Technical Research Centre (Finland) and the Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center at Tel Aviv Univ (Israel)   hereby invites members of city administrations across the world to participate in our upcoming proposal with the aim 

“…to ESTABLISH, ENABLE and ACCELERATE diffusion of an innovative “Hybrid Human-Technology Blockchain” cyber safety solution with a focus on building communities of learning based on human trust (supported by collaboration technologies) that democratically shares sensitive knowledge of cyber incidents, risks and actionable safety improvements in order to raise the cyber safety resilience of cities in a demonstrable and sustainable manner in alignment with suitable urban cyber security frameworks .” 

The area of focus for the proposal will be the mission area “Smart Cities” . Our related competencies are (among others) in the areas of accelerating innovation diffusion, cyber security, ecosystems, high value manufacturing (a “lens” for understanding the nature of cities), and (polymath) cultures. A mission in this area helps meet the goals and targets set out by international policy frameworks such as the COP21 Paris Agreement , the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (notably SDG11) , the Urban Agenda for the EU  and the Habitat III New Urban Agenda  as cities play a key role in all of them.” Proposal submission will be under the upcoming Horizon Europe program (specific calls pending). The proposal will apply for five-year project duration with a budget up to €15M funding. 

The first step in creating the proposal will be semi-structured interviews with members of city administrations and literature research to determine 

• what cyber safety reference frameworks are relevant, 

• how such frameworks are implemented in cities and

• what factors influence the diffusion speed of relevant solutions. 

Insights will be submitted for publishing to a leading journal  in 2021 and form the basis for the excellence section of the proposal.

Interviews and literature research will begin in <tbd> and last until <tbd>. Interviews will last 90 minutes and be conducted virtually. Participants will receive access to the survey in advance of the interview"

ACT-FASTER! Questionnaire

This questionnaire is the starting point for understanding how municipalities / organizations perceive cyber safety and collaborate to manage incidents and threats. Respondents are requested to complete the questionnaire as well as possible, return it to oliver.schwabe@innovation-web.eu and then help organize a 90 minute call to explore, discuss and enhance their responses. Any open questions will be resolved in the interview, all results returned to participants in an anonymized format and those results also used as the basis for the ACT-FASTER! proposal. All survey / interview participants will be invited to join the proposal with appropriate letters of intent. Please enter any comments in the fields “[___]”. The primary question is in Section 1.

** Please note that you should not enter any specific names of individuals or organizations in this survey **

Section 1: A Success Story

The survey is based on identifying and exploring a success story where your organization (or a member of your ecosystem) was impacted by a cyber security challenge and this challenge was successfully mastered. 

Please describe this success story as well as you can. Please pay special attention to describing who was involved, what information was shared, via what channels information was shared (i.e. email or phone calls) and why you think that the challenge was mastered so successfully. [___]

Based on your description of the success story now please answer the following questions as best as possible – your answers will be discussed during the interview. Please note that the questions and roles are based on previous research into the patterns of success in diffusing innovations from ideation to the critical adoption thresholds in user groups. The answers to these questions populate the “Litmus Test Version 3”  which simulates and forecasts the diffusion time for the intended cyber safety solution(s). "

Important: The rest of the questionnaire will be shared with consortium members and interviewees only.

Cheers and we look forward to hearing from you

Oliver

P.S. If you are interested in learning more please visit us at www.innovation-web.eu, our LinkedIn Group at https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8779542/, our blog at https://www.innovation-web.eu/entov-hvm-blog, our Researchgate project page at https://www.researchgate.net/project/Open-European-Network-for-Enterprise-Innovation-in-High-Value-Manufacturing-ENTOV-HVM, our Sourceforge page at https://sourceforge.net/projects/entov-hvm/  and our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/groups/2014779865300180/. You can also follow us via Twitter: @owschwabe (#innovationweb) and the LinkedIn Group page https://www.linkedin.com/company/entov.