News story: Improving crowd resilience: apply now for innovation funding

The Home Office is to invest up to £2 million in ideas that will reduce the threat from terrorists and the use of explosives and weapons in public spaces by using the crowd as a sensor.

Funding is available for the development of technologies that will use the crowd to identify a threat by:

• detecting the crowd’s conscious and sub-conscious reaction to threats
• training the public to spot threats
• enabling the crowd to report threats

This competition seeks proposals for technologies, systems and behavioural sciences.

This is a Defence and Security Accelerator and Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) competition. It’s part of the Home Office security-related science and technology programme.

This is phase 1 of a 2-phase competition.

• this competition is open now
• the application deadline is midday on 20 September 2017
• there will be an innovation network event on 27 July 2017
• SBRI is open to any type of organisation
• successful projects will attract 100% funded development contracts
• up to £1 million is available for phase 1 of this competition
• up to £1 million will be available for phase 2