SpartaNews

Strategic Research and Innovation Roadmap: A Learning Road

19th Oct 2020

The Roadmap Committee has designed instruments and conducted activities that push the evolution of the SPARTA Strategic Research and Innovation (SRI) roadmap to become the main guideline for decision makers to develop strategies to strengthen the EU’s cybersecurity capacity, to close cyber skill gaps and to address emerging challenges appropriately. With SPARTA’s mission-oriented, agile and open approach, the SPARTA SRI will shape the cybersecurity technologies required to establish and maintain a European Strategic Digital Autonomy.

The SPARTA SRI has been successfully presented and discussed with SPARTA associates and friends during the digital Brokerage Event that took place in June. Furthermore, the SPARTA Days #4 collocated with the EuroS&P cybersecurity conference, have been leveraged to present the roadmap challenges and visions to a varied academic audience. The rather specialized audience allowed to present the roadmap achievements with technical details on the technological horizontals that SPARTA defines as building blocks for its mission programs.

Due to Covid 19 restrictions presentations were only possible through digital formats. Though the presentation were very well accepted, we learned that the digital format must be enriched with online offerings to collect feedback from the community in a systematic manner. Therefore, an online questionnaire has been designed and deployed which is constantly available on SPARTA’s website to propose new technology, education and/or certification challenges that could become part of the SPARTA roadmap to strengthen SPARTA’s mission. A template is given to guide contributions in a structured manner. It is essential not only to identify new or extended challenges but also argue how programs covering the identified challenges will strengthen European digital autonomy in cybersecurity, and how they will be beneficial for a European single market. We also ask to perform a GAP analysis to clearly reveal gaps, that must be filled within a given timeline.

If you want to take part in shaping future European cybersecurity research, communicate your challenges here.

SPARTA has also started discussions and information exchange sessions with the roadmap representatives of all the other three EU CCN pilots. This exercise produced a holistic view on how the roadmapping activities of each pilot align with respect to building a CCN in Europe. Based on the collected information, further collaborations with the other pilots are planned to identify the components that could be consolidated for building a stronger and harmonized CCN in Europe.

Next Steps

In a joint agreement with representatives of the European Commission, the SPARTA SRI activities will focus the new opportunities and challenges coming with the well-known speed-up in digitization due to Covid-19 lockdown. SPARTA plans to invite the roadmap representatives of all pilots in a joint online discussion to identify these new challenges and how the challenges should be addressed appropriately. The results are going to be presented at the 4P Convergence Event planned for December this year, where SPARA is coordinating the Roadmap Focus Group.

SPARTA is also in the process of designing a second questionnaire that is intended to collect feedback and grading on existing roadmap challenges from the SPARTA network. Moreover, we prepare to enrich the online presentation of the SPARTA SRI with a format based on visualization items that would ease the navigation of the SPARTA roadmap for the interested reader.