Centres of Expertise (CoE)
Centre of expertise
What is it?
A Centre of Expertise (CoE) is an organisation operating in the domain of Crisis Management and Disaster Risk Reduction that acts as the primary contact point for practitioner organisations at the national or regional level, supporting their capability development and innovation management. A CoE may choose to adopt either the whole suite of DRIVER+ outputs or only some of its components.
While applying these outputs, organisations are free to tailor and adapt them to local or national needs, circumstances and capacities. A CoE not only uses the DRIVER+ outputs but also supports other organisations in using these. It can also maintain and update DRIVER+ outputs and exchange lessons learned between other Centres of Expertise in the various European Member States. In this way, CoEs become part of a pan-European network.
Who is it for?
Organisations that already play a role in the
capability development and/or innovation management of practitioner organisations
are well-suited to adopt DRIVER+ outputs and become a Centre of Expertise. These may be national or regional training centres, Crisis Management academies and knowledge centres for specific crisis types such as forest fires. They may cover a wide range of Crisis Management aspects or focus on a specific topic such as the usage of drones or training of firefighters. A CoE is a practitioner-centred organisation that has close relations with (applied) research organisations, solution providers and policy-makers.
What is the Added value?
Becoming a Centre of Expertise will strengthen your pioneering position in the Crisis Management and Disaster Risk Reduction ecosystem, both nationally and internationally. It will increase the visibility of your organisation at the EU level as an early adopter bringing forward innovation in Crisis Management. Through this, you can expand and strengthen the portfolio of services that you already offer, for instance by sharing lessons learned and improving knowledge transfer between practitioners and research organisations. This can help with the development of new training programmes and improving curricula, as well as producing clear recommendations for policy-makers about research programming and specifi c funding needs.
The DRIVER+ team has developed a toolkit to support you in jointly assessing the requirements for becoming a CoE, depending on which (combination of) outputs you wish to adopt. More information to follow soon.