The European Union (EU) is increasingly affected and challenged by geopolitical changes, increasing impact of conflict on civilians, globalized impact of local conflicts, technological developments and budgetary constraints challenges the Radicalization, the growing potential for individuals to create large security threats and transnational criminality further complicates the security landscape of EU missions. With global interconnectedness, the repercussions of outside conflict are also seen within the EU, and may lead to societal and security challenges within the EU. The key issue for the EU is how to improve its conflict response capabilities to create more lasting impact on the ground and to use limited resources more effectively. Comprehensive EU-security within the EU emphasizes the need for civil-military synergies, which correspond more closely to challenges on the ground and the incorporation of very different perspectives, priorities and operational cultures. The IECEU–project analyses and assesses best practices and lessons learned with a view to enhance the civilian conflict prevention and peace building capabilities of EU with a catalogue of practices, new solutions and approaches. It will seek to find out how to increase the interoperability of resources in the crisis management and peace building and what the potential for pooling and sharing of EU capabilities and technologies is. The main goals of the IECEU -project are: 1) Analysing and assessing the current situation of on-going and past missions and operations 2) Learning from lessons provided by these missions and assessing the different options 3) Providing new solutions, approaches and recommendations for EU to guarantee long-term stability

Effective EU support to a large external crisis requires new approaches. In response to this challenge and to identified user and market needs from previous projects, Reaching Out proposes an innovative multi-disciplinary approach that will optimize the efforts, address a wide spectrum of users and maximize market innovation success. This approach results in five main objectives: to 1. Develop a Collaborative Framework, with distributed platforms of functional services, 2. Implement a flexible and open “collaborative innovation” process involving users and SMEs, suppliers, operators and research organisations, 3. Develop, upgrade and integrate 78 new connectable and interoperable tools, 4. Conduct 5 large scale demonstrations on the field: o health disaster in Africa (Epidemics in Guinea, with strong social and cultural issues), o natural disaster in a politically complex region and a desert environment (Earthquake in the Jordan Valley, led jointly by Jordan, Israel and Palestine), o three global change disasters in Asia targeted at large evacuation and humanitarian support in Bangladesh (long lasting floods, huge storms and associated epidemics,), EU citizen support and repatriation in Shanghai (floods & storm surge), radiological and industrial disasters impacting EU assets in Taiwan (flash floods, landslides, storm surge and chemical and radiological disasters), supported and co-funded by local authorities, 5. Provide recommendations and evaluations for future legal and policy innovations. The project will be conducted under the supervision of senior end-users. It will be performed with flexible and proven procedures by a balanced consortium of users, industry, innovative SMEs, RTO and academia in the EU and the demonstration regions. The main expected impact is to improve external disaster and crisis management efficiency and cost-benefit and increase the EU visibility whilst enhancing EU industry competitiveness and enlarging the market.