The ILEAnet project will set up and develop a sustainable network of Law Enforcement Agency (LEA) practitioner organisations from all over Europe. The mission of this network will be to stimulate LEA capabilities to influence, develop and take up research, development and innovation (RDI) that is useful and usable for LEAs, and thereby help them to tackle the major challenges they face. The network will be organised around ILEAnet National Contacts (INCs) who will be in charge of federating the respective networks of practitioners, policy makers, academics, industrial players and other RDI stakeholders in their respective countries. ILEAnet will also operate as a community of people with a common interest in exchanging and collaborating with respect to LEA challenges and needs and LEA-centred RDI. Whilst the organisational ILEAnet Network will be focused – “top-down” - on specific challenges, the ILEAnet Community of people will contribute “bottom-up” ideas to produce innovative approaches to face newly arising challenges. An online community platform will enable professional social networking and mutual online assistance related to new solutions and best practice to address LEA challenges. The platform will support online and physical meetings and discussions, and will provide the infrastructure for efficient knowledge management. Synthesising top-down approaches and bottom-up ideas in iterative survey-organise-brainstorm-analyse-propose-discuss-poll processes, ILEAnet will build up a broad portfolio of RDI results and new RDI project concepts, and will deliver recommendations for future RDI policies. ILEAnet will hence catalyse innovation between LEAs and between LEAs, academics and industry. This will enable LEAs not only to take up mature results but also to prepare and influence future RDI efforts which could be taken up by individual or groupings of organisations and countries as well as by European research funding programmes.