Arup with Lloyd’s Register Foundation 

Best Use of Thought Leadership

In early 2017, the Lloyd’s Register Foundation appointed Arup to host its Joint Programme for Resilience Engineering (JPRE), which aimed to improve resilience within and between critical infrastructure sectors globally: in short, to make the world better and safer to live in.

It called the JPRE ‘an opportunity to accelerate the resilience shift by promoting resilience engineering as a new approach that challenges old paradigms’. The JPRE comprised a grant of £10 million over a period of five years, and the autonomy to manage the programme as Arup saw best to deliver the outcomes the Lloyd’s Register Foundation was looking for.

Arup and Lloyd’s Register Foundation shared the vision of JPRE more as a global movement than simply a finite programme, with a potential life far beyond its initial five years, and recognised that to mobilise support across all its potential partners and build credibility quickly, the initiative needed an identity of its own: The Resilience Shift.

Collaborations and partnerships were crucial to the success of The Resilience Shift. Arup’s radically different approach to delivering this through a new, neutral platform with its own identity was instrumental. It demonstrates Arup’s ethos of shaping a better world by adding to the sum of human knowledge for everyone’s benefit – a rising tide that lifts all boats.

Through The Resilience Shift, Arup created something new and innovative, that drew on its deep domain knowledge, cross-sector experience, and global networks to fundamentally change the understanding of resilience among decision-makers across the world.

Engaging with more than 650 organisations and 5,500 individuals globally, as well as 90 academic institutions over its first four years. This direct engagement has taken place through numerous different interactions: 49 grants (in over 10 countries) and grantee activity, workshops and events, project collaborations and invited authorship.

The Resilience Shift has produced new initiatives, tools and approaches with global relevance, covering sectors from water, roads and energy to the human side of resilience leadership. It’s reached new audiences and enriched its own knowledge base and service to clients and mobilised a global movement to collaborate and build a discipline of resilience engineering.

View the Arup profile in the MCA Members Directory.