BRIGAID

Recent studies from the IPCC indicate that Europe is particularly prone to increased risks of river and coastal floods, droughts resulting in water restrictions and damages from extreme weather such as heat events and wildfires. Evaluations also show a huge potential to reduce these risks with novel adaptation strategies. Researchers, innovators and incubators develop innovative products and services to reduce the increased climate change risks. Many of these innovations however hardly arrive at the markets. BRIGAID BRIdges the GAp for Innovations in Disaster resilience.

BRIGAID strives to bridge the gap between innovators and end-users. BRIGAID’s mission is to provide integral support for innovations for climate adaptation, focusing on climate-driven disasters like floods, droughts and extreme weather, by making innovations technically stronger, more socially acceptable, and more attractive to investors. BRIGAID offers state-of-the-art, scientific knowledge and cutting-edge methods for advancing the socio-technical readiness of innovations. BRIGAID also offers and networking opportunities and supports the development of successful business plans.

BRIGAID aims to provide integral support for innovations for climate adaptation, focusing on climate-driven disasters like floods, droughts and extreme weather. The project strives to bridge the gap between innovators and end-users, according to the following roadmap:

• Identify 75-100 existing innovations (Technical Readiness Level - TRL 4-8);

• Select the most promising 35-50 innovations for further testing, validation and demonstration;

• Improve these innovations;

• Select and support the 20-30 most promising innovations for market introduction;

• Establish this process to make it an on-going, structural activity beyond BRIGAID’s lifetime.

Seven steps form the path to deliver innovations to the market through the assessment and improvement of technical, social and financial readiness:

1. Establishment of a network of test facilities and implementation/demonstration sites across Europe for innovations that reduce impacts from floods, droughts and extreme weather.

2. Strong involvement of innovators: secured support from a broad range of innovation platforms.

3. A Test and Implementation Framework (TIF), which delivers a standardised methodology for an independent, scientific judgment of the socio-technological effectiveness of innovations and the assessment of effectiveness of risk reducing measures.

4. Support in business development through a Market Analysis Framework (MAF+) to identify market opportunities and select business models.

5. Development of a Public-Private Investment and Financing (PPIF) model for securing on-going investments in (clusters of) innovations.

6. Performance of online and offline marketing activities to expose innovations to end users, e.g. an online Innovation Sharing Platform (ISP) as the EU portal for innovations.

7. Strong involvement of end users: secured engagement of end users and potential paying customers.

Since 2016, BRIGAID has helped climate innovators turn their ideas for climate disaster resilience into implementable solutions by developing and providing a full range of support services. BRIGAID has developed a unique mix of methods and tools to advance the readiness of innovations. The “toolbox” consists of three elements:

1. A framework that evaluates the effectiveness of innovations and the organizational and governance requirements (TIF). The purpose of BRIGAID’s Testing and Implementation Framework (TIF) is to provide innovators with guidelines and tools for evaluating the socio-technical effectiveness of an innovation in terms of its ability to reduce risks from floods, droughts, or extreme weather in an operational environment, and guidelines for assessing an innovation’s impact across various geographic scales and socio-economic and environmental sectors.
2. A business development and financing model for climate adaptation innovations (MAF). BRIGAID Business Development Support upskills innovators so that they can bring their climate resilience innovation to market. This positively impacts Europe – these innovations will decrease the damages of climate change and generate good jobs and income.
3. An online interactive platform Climate Innovation Window that presents innovations and connects innovators, end users and qualified investors throughout Europe.

These methods and tools have been validated in the project by reviewing more than 120 promising innovations on floods, droughts and extreme weather, improving the 35-50 most promising ones, and bringing the top 20-30 innovations with the highest socio-technical and investment readiness to the market.

Another important result of the project is the creation of an association, BRIGAID Connect - A “One-Stop-Shop” for Supporting Climate Adaptation Innovations: Innovation For Resilience. BRIGAID Connect is a sustainable independent entity that transforms innovators into entrepreneurs, connects them to end-users and technical experts, to ultimately deliver adaptation innovations that improve European climate resilience.

Information about the BRIGAID project and the Support to Innovators, Involvement of End-Users, and Information for Investors are available via the BRIGAID website.