If you are a practitioner and are interested in research or innovation projects to protect critical infrastructure, to make society more resilient or to develop new operating resources, to name just a few topics of civil security research, contact us and become a member of the Research Network of German Practitioners free of charge.
EU-funded security research projects enable you as a practitioner to address your research needs, i.e. to generate added value for society. These projects serve as a strategic tool to better prepare for future challenges. ForAn facilitates access to European research funds for German practitioners who are active or want to become active in civil security research through targeted support measures. Compared to the national budget, the total budget of European security research in Horizon Europe is on average three times as high and the project budget on average twice as high. By leading consortia in European security research projects, these funds can be optimally leveraged and used for the one's own needs. Cross-practitioner networking also allows research interests to be pooled to give greater weight to individual projects. ForAn members also have the opportunity to use the network to respond to regular research needs surveys conducted by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and thus submit their research concerns directly to the relevant committees. This provides many practitioners with their first opportunity to place their needs in future research calls. ForAn also acts as an intermediary between consortia looking for German practitioners and the members of the network. In addition, members can share research requests that they do not want to or cannot fulfil in the network and thus contribute to the exchange of information.
But what is the role of a practitioner in a collaborative research project?
Conceptual representation of practitioner tasks in a research project.
The main task as a practitioner is to elicit and communicate the operational needs in the corresponding topic area, e.g. by providing use cases or scenarios that enable technical partners from industry or research to develop an understanding of the challenges the practitioners face in order to develop solutions while taking into account the legal and ethical framework.
A second crucial task is testing the solutions developed in the project by technical partners: On the one hand, practitioners support the definition of requirements for technical solutions, on the other hand they have an important role in testing and validating the solutions. i.e. practitioners test prototypes and give feedback so that these prototypes can be further developed.
