Cluster Innovations for Resilience

Understanding the spread of people-centered innovations for risk management

The Innovations for Resilience Cluster is a multi-disciplinary research group (sociologists, geographers, historians, engineers, climatologists and geo-scientists, hydrologists, architects, doctors, managers, communicators, etc.) involved in understanding the dissemination of "people-centered innovations" to make them actors in crisis management and strengthen their resilience.

Indeed, in just a few years, many "smart" innovations explicitly dedicated to different types of crisis management or vulnerability reduction have been developed by public and private players worldwide to integrate concerned or recognized publics. The research cluster's main focus is on smart, decentralized, often small-scale, "easy-to-use" innovations, some of which benefit from recent advances in microelectronics and digital industries, the trend towards artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. This is helping to generalize agile, cost-effective solutions (small sensors, mobile applications, for example) which, coupled with institutional innovations, should complement or replace traditional institutional and expert-centric responses.

Many of these innovations stem from public-private partnerships; they concern many different geographical and political territories; some are market-driven, others are "bottom-up" (stemming from a grassroots innovation process).  The public concerned, the "end user", can appear as both a target and a producer of information (Al Dahdah, 2019), sometimes through community engagement but also as a virtual or physical human sensor (Goodchild, 2007).

An important question that the cluster addresses is the analysis of the extent to which these innovations lead to a change in risk governance with a more inclusive perspective. The cluster program mainly addresses issues related to:

• change in design methodologies (user-centered, frugal, grassroots innovation) at all stages, from idea to sustained use, with a challenge on integrating learning approaches from crisis and vulnerability experiences (as recommended in risk cycle management) and existing long and ordinary practices concerning risk phenomena ;
• legal and public policy dimensions, including privacy protection with regard to data capture, liability transfer and insurance scheme implications, market regulations for public issues (health, natural and industrial hazards) and the sustainable economic model;
• the changing role of risk expertise, the position of experts and their capacity for action in the face of the emergence of new players and possible changes in institutional and power relations.

The Innovations for Resilience cluster conducts research projects (master's, doctorate, senior researchers) in partnership with various territories, fosters new partnerships and provides scientific leadership on these subjects to Grenoble's research communities, as well as internationally.