Future Leaders Competition 2026

What is this initiative?

The IIC Future Leaders Competition, now in its ninth year, and supported by the members of the IIC, encourages and promotes original thought in the areas of communications and policy.

What do you need to do?

This year entrants are asked to produce an essay, submitted electronically, on the following topic:

Effective emergency preparedness: safeguarding ICT systems and infrastructure from disruption.

Communications networks are treated as a critical national infrastructure because of the key role they play (increasingly) in daily life but also as a means of communicating in times of emergency. For example the international reaction to last September’s Red Sea cable cuts [1] or the devastation caused to communications by natural disasters such as Storm Melissa in Jamaica [2].

The ability to prepare for, and withstand, interruptions to communications networks, or network resilience, is defined by the ITU as ‘The ability to provide and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of faults and challenges to normal operation of a given communication network, based on prepared facilities’ [3].

In this year’s essay we would like you to concentrate on two principal policy areas that define ‘network resilience’. These are:

• the protection of infrastructure (undersea and telecommunications) including data centres and
• diversification within the telecommunications supply chain.

Do you find the current policies designed to protect national and international communications systems from disruption to be sufficient? Is anything more needed – why and how might it be achieved?

References:

[1]  Please click here to read.

[2] Please click here to read.

[3] Please click here to read.

Please submit your essay directly to enquiries@iicom.org

You should:

• Develop a sustained and well-structured response, addressing the questions asked
• Show evidence and justification for your position
• Show an awareness & understanding of contending viewpoints
• Show commercial awareness & understanding of competitive market forces

(To find out more please click the box below)