The team at the ERCIS Competence Centre for Crisis Management is delighted that the EU project DRIVER+ has won the Security Innovation Award 2025 in the category ‘Best Open Source Innovation’.

The award recognises visionaries who make a significant contribution to protecting our society and its citizens with innovative solutions. At the same time, the innovation award offers the opportunity to highlight and promote outstanding developments from EU-funded security research projects.

The DRIVER+ (Driving Innovation in Crisis Management for European Resilience) project, which was completed in 2020, aimed to address current and future challenges in crisis management, particularly in light of increasing natural disasters and terrorist threats. The focus was on developing and introducing innovative solutions tailored to the operational needs of practitioners in the field of crisis management.

One of the most important results of the project is the Trial Guidance Methodology (TGM) – a structured, practice-oriented approach for systematically testing and evaluating crisis management solutions under realistic conditions. The methodology was developed jointly by the DRIVER+ consortium and is now actively maintained and further developed by the ERCIS Competence Centre for Crisis Management. It continues to support innovation efforts across Europe and beyond.

Over several years, the DRIVER+ consortium has built up an international network of experts from research institutions, public authorities and industry to improve Europe's resilience to increasingly complex crises. The project placed crisis management practitioners at the centre of the innovation cycle and enabled them to take a leading role in evaluating technologies and procedures in realistic test environments.

The award at SRE2025 is a valuable endorsement of this practice-oriented philosophy and the lasting impact of DRIVER+ far beyond the official conclusion of the project. The TGM has since been used in numerous research projects (e.g. STAMINA, CARE-FLOW) and by practice organisations such as the Fire Service Institute of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Links to this announcement:

Access the methodology: tgm.ercis.org

Learn more about the DRIVER+ project: DRIVER+ website