Crisis contingency is about predicting people’s responses to threat or danger, to help keep them safe in the future. HMGCC Co-Creation’s latest challenge is seeking to evaluate tools that provide a synthetic environment to simulate how populations might respond to scenarios such as widespread disinformation or terrorism.

Organisations are being invited to apply for workstream one, workstream two, or both.

• Workstream one is to undertake paper-based landscape mapping to evaluate synthetic environment tools (landscape mapping).
• Workstream two is to provide the evaluation environment for these tools.
• Experts who have a tool they would like to be evaluated as part of the challenge can register their interest.

HMGCC Co-Creation will provide funding for time, materials, overheads and other indirect expenses.

Technology themes
Artificial intelligence, behavioural and social sciences, data science and engineering, digital twinning, information technology, modelling and simulation, psychology and sociology.

Key information

Budget, up to: Workstream one: £70,000, Workstream two: £105,000, Workstream two call-off to support third-party charges for selected tools: £30,000
Project duration 18 weeks
Competition opens Monday 4 August
Competition closes Thursday 4 September at 5pm

Context of the challenge

National security needs the right tools to help it predict population responses, in a bid to be more resilient and to help protect the nation against threats such as terrorism or disinformation. All use of this technology needs to be legal, necessary and proportionate.

For this reason, HMGCC Co-Creation wants to find and evaluate tools that can create a synthetic environment of a population, with a varying degree of market
maturity, to simulate responses to certain scenarios and help in crisis planning.

To assure that national security invests in the tools that give the greatest chance of success, HMGCC Co-Creation are co-ordinating a challenge to landscape map tools available or in development, in parallel to capability evaluation.

The challenge is being delivered across two parallel workstreams delivered over a period of 18-weeks.

Who should apply?

This challenge is open to sole innovators, industry, academic and research organisations of all types and sizes. There is no requirement for security clearances.
Solution providers or direct collaboration from countries listed by the UK government under trade sanctions and/or arms embargoes, are not eligible for HMGCC Co-Creation challenges.

Evaluation criteria

All proposals, regardless of the application route, will be assessed by the HMGCC Co-Creation team. Proposals will be scored 1–5 on the following criteria:

Scope: Does the proposal fit within the challenge scope, taking into consideration cost and benefit?

Innovation: Is the technical solution credible, will it create new knowledge and IP, or use existing IP?

Deliverables: Will the proposal deliver a full or partial solution, if a partial solution, are there collaborations identified?

Timescale: Will the proposal deliver a minimum viable product within the project duration?

Budget: Are the project finances within the competition scope?

Team: Are the organisation / delivery team credible in this technical area?

HMGCC Co-Creation supporting information

HMGCC works with the national security community, UK government, academia, private sector partners and international allies to bring engineering ingenuity to the national security mission, creating tools and technologies that drive us ahead and help to protect the nation.

HMGCC Co–Creation is a partnership between HMGCC and Dstl (Defence Science and Technology Laboratory), created to deliver a new, bold and innovative way of working with the wider UK science and technology community. We bring together the best in class across industry, academia, and government, to work collaboratively on national security engineering challenges and accelerate innovation. 

HMGCC Co-Creation aims to work collaboratively with the successful solution providers by utilising in-house delivery managers working Agile by default. This process will involve access to HMGCC Co-Creation’s technical expertise and facilities to bring a product to market more effectively than traditional customer supplier relationships.