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The importance of standards and standardization for the various phases of the innovation process was already described several years ago (e.g. Blind, 2013). Other literature focuses mostly on the economic benefits of standardization (e.g. Blind et al., 2011) or the general relationship to innovation in various domains (e.g. Blind et al., 2016). Within research projects, however, the topics of standards and standardization play no or only a very minor role. This has changed significantly in recent years. In this context, Sanjuán et al. (2011) already pointed out more than 10 years ago how important it is to consider standardization during all phases of a research project. Almost simultaneously, research projects began to systematically use existing standards to review the state of the art in their field of research and to conduct standardization activities to transfer their project results into new standards (e.g. iNTeg-Risk, 2021). This was triggered by new European Commission regulations promoting standardization as a tool to support the dissemination and exploitation of research projects (e.g. European Commission, 2018). Nevertheless, most researchers are still not aware of the benefits of standards and standardization for their projects. Bringing together relevant stakeholders on a particular research topic is one of the main benefits that standardization offers, especially for complex topics (e.g. Lindner et al., 2021a). For example, city resilience is such a broad topic that it requires the involvement of a wide range of stakeholders to achieve.
The topic of city resilience was already introduced several years ago. However, it has come into the spotlight more than ever due to the recent floods in Europe, which caused the highest number of deaths from a natural hazard in Germany in almost 60 years (Fekete & Sandholz, 2021), and due to the still ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (e.g. McCartney et al., 2021). However, existing approaches supporting resilience, such as the “Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030” (UNDRR, 2015), or various resilience-enhancing tools derived from research projects (e.g. SMR, 2021), have been available for years but have not had a significant impact on countries and cities to apply them to prepare for such crisis situations. For example, Fekete and Sandholz (2021) have already analyzed the gaps and challenges of the recent flood in Western Germany by sorting them according to the four different priority areas of the Sendai Framework. The difficulty of managing the large number of volunteers was one of the identified challenges during and after the flood. However, this aspect has already been addressed since 2017 in an international standard, the ISO 22319 on ‘Security and resilience - Community resilience - Guidelines for planning the involvement of spontaneous volunteers’ (ISO, 2021).