Complex Adaptive Systems (Broad Agency Announcement)

SBIR Phase I — US Small Business Innovation is sponsored by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This program provides early-stage funding for highly innovative R&D projects, with active funding areas including blockchain for federal applications, decentralized identity, AI safety, and quantum computing. It is non-dilutive and open to US-based small businesses.

IA Resilience call reinforcing Europe's strenght in health is sponsored by European Commission — Horizon Europe. Expected Outcome: the proposals under this call are expected to address one or more of the following subjects : • Enhanced personalized monitoring, care and treatments, focusing on the development of highly customized healthcare solutions, including the required research and diagnostic tools, tailored to individual needs, covering various scenarios such as chronic disease management, physiotherapy, precision diagnosis, personalized medicine/treatment, pre- and postoperative care, and daily assistance in homes and common spaces. It also targets effective management of chronic diseases and elderly care through personalized monitoring and interventions facilitated by advanced sensor technologies and edge-to-cloud solutions. This includes the development and integration of solutions for Hospitalization at Home, enabling patients to receive complex, remotely supervised care using intelligent medical devices capable of sensing, analysing, and transmitting real-time data. This requires a continuum, from in-hospital diagnostics to robust, long-term patient support at home via AI-driven care pathways and hospitalization at home. • Prevention and treatment of diseases, allowing the improved scientific understanding, early detection and proactive prevention of diseases through scientific research, continuous monitoring, predictive analytics, and timely alerts, possibly powered by AI algorithms. This preventive approach enables early intervention and significantly reduces risks associated with many illnesses such as viral infections (e.g. epi- and pan demics), cardiovascular diseases, diabetes complications affecting the health of the young and old. • Efficient, scalable, and cost-effective healthcare, demonstrating how ECS-based technologies can streamline clinical workflows, reduce administrative burdens, and improve resource allocation in healthcare systems. This includes automation and intelligent operations management across clinical, diagnostic, and homecare settings, ultimately improving cost-effectiveness and scalability. • Secure and compliant healthcare continuum, including solutions that ensure robust data protection and regulatory compliance (e.g. GDPR), particularly in handling sensitive health data. Projects should adopt privacy-by-design principles and implement secure data handling architectures using localized edge computing, encryption, authentication, and anonymization strategies within both clinical and assisted living environments. • Seamless interoperability across devices, systems, and platforms, addressing the integration of heterogeneous systems across the edge-to-cloud continuum. Solutions should rely on open standards and modular architectures to ensure interoperability, flexibility, and adaptability across various healthcare settings and use cases, fostering a unified European health-tech ecosystem. Programme areas: Horizon Europe (HORIZON), Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness, Digital, Industry and Space

From lab to market: Strengthening the role of Technology Transfer Offices in bringing knowledge to the market is sponsored by European Commission — Horizon Europe. Expected Outcome: Project results are expected to contribute to the following outcomes: Increased commercialisation of academic research results, by facilitating access for industry, startups and scaleups to the intellectual assets of academic research; Strengthened collaboration between industry and academia, reflected in an increased number of technology transfer deals and joint R&D projects resulting in market-ready innovations; Introduced more startup friendly intellectual asset transfer/licensing policies in universities/research and higher education institutions/RTOs; Increased number of spinoffs by enabling researchers to overcome the barriers to commercialising their intellectual assets; Reduced transaction costs related to Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) negotiations by establishing more standardised asset transfer policies across universities/research and higher education institutions/RTOs; Optimised transfer/licensing processes by universities/research and higher education institutions/RTOs based on grouping intellectual assets in portfolios that can be commercialised in package deals that are more attractive for industry and investors. Scope: Academic knowledge producing organisations (universities, research and higher education institutions and RTOs) are acting as innovation engines by fuelling startups and industries with new knowledge, technologies and skilled individuals. This potential can be nurtured with efficient intellectual management strategies and effective Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs). However, Europe’s potential of research valorisation is underutilised. Currently, it is challenging for industrial actors to identify and access academic results that have potential for commercialisation. On the one hand, a relatively complex fragmented landscape of TTOs generates high transaction costs discouraging companies, especially startups from engaging in collaboration or accessing academic research for commercialisation. On the other hand, the lack of financial and non-financial incentives for academic researchers hampers their commitment. Indeed, in many cases, researchers cannot fully appropriate royalties from the licensing of intellectual assets and knowledge valorisation activities are not recognised for their career progression. In this regard, the Draghi report [1] recommends European universities/RTOs to adopt a more coordinated, commercialisation minded, and startup friendly intellectual asset management approach [2] . Participating beneficiaries should engage in the following activities: adopting startup-friendly intellectual asset management strategies; accelerating the commercialisation of academic research results under fair and transparent conditions in an attractive way for innovative companies and investors, in particular for critical technology areas related to the EU’s economic security; reinforcing the adoption of best practices in intellectual asset management [3] including the equitable sharing of value generated in R&I activities; improving the support to researchers and students in commercialising research results; enhancing intellectual asset management practices by establishing portfolio approaches to market intellectual assets in package deals; facilitating the collaboration between researchers, startups and innovative companies. More specifically, project participants should: Identify and share best-practices developed to support knowledge valorisation [4] ; On this basis, create a common set of tools for start-up friendly licensing/transfer [5] to be adapted to the specific national/regional context with templates, strategies, successful case studies and business models. The toolbox could include standardised rules and processes together with flexible and adaptable clauses to support negotiation, conclusion and implementation of licensing agreements; Develop a common incentives and benefit-sharing model ensuring incentives for researchers and students to engage in com Programme areas: Horizon Europe (HORIZON), Innovative Europe, European innovation ecosystems Keywords: IPR management, Market-creating innovation, Technology transfer

Understanding and tackling the decline of insects is sponsored by European Commission — Horizon Europe. Expected Outcome: Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes: researchers better understand the status and population trends of insect species and the drivers of their decline; competent authorities in charge of biodiversity policies at all levels are capable of taking informed decisions, based on better understanding and valuation of socioeconomic benefits and ecological importance of insects, including for climate action; society and relevant land managers are better informed and equipped to tackle the drivers of the decline of insects. Scope: Insects play a vital role contributing to ecosystem functions in addition to pollination, such as decomposition and nutrient cycles, soil formation (including carbon sequestration) and pest control, control functions essential for maintaining ecosystem complexity, and are an indispensable part of the food chain. Those functions are key for climate change mitigation and allow the provision of ecosystem services which have economic benefits and support human well-being. Additionally, insects play a key role in other socioeconomic areas such as medical and pharmaceutical applications (e.g. antimicrobial peptides), forensic science or biotechnology. The dramatic decline of insects, estimated around 75% in the last three decades, is raising increasing concern among scientists and in the public, since it could have far-reaching implications. In order to be able to tackle this decline, there is a need to improve our understanding of the drivers of loss and how they interplay. A better knowledge of insects themselves is necessary. With targets 4 and 5 of the EU biodiversity strategy for 2030, the EU took, among others, the commitment that by 2030 habitats and species show no deterioration in conservation trend and status, at least 30% reach favourable conservation status or at least show a positive trend, and that the decline of pollinators is reversed. According to the EU Nature Restoration Regulation, Member States shall put in place appropriate and effective measures to improve pollinator diversity and reverse the decline of pollinators by 2030. This is reflected in target 4 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. The European Climate Law requires Member States to adopt and implement national adaptation strategies and plans in which they should promote Nature-based Solutions and ecosystem-based adaptation. These policies and legislations have reached the implementation stage in the EU and worldwide. Successful proposals are expected to: improve understanding and identification of insects’ diversity, including through genomic approaches; focus on less known insect groups. In particular a solid knowledge has already been generated regarding pollination and pollinating insects through past and ongoing projects, therefore they are not expected to be subject to new research under this topic; assess the status and trends of insects and analyse multiple drivers affecting them, as well as the ecosystem services that insects provide, at different spatial scales. A comprehensive integrative taxonomy approach should be adopted, incorporating a multidisciplinary framework, including ecology and ecotoxicology, and integrating methods that address the diverse needs of insects across their entire lifecycle, ensuring the identification of essential habitat resources at each stage of development. To assess the status and trends of insects and the effectiveness of strategies, proposals should develop and test approaches for long-term monitoring schemes for insects, possibly building on existing national or EU biodiversity monitoring schemes and pilots developed by Biodiversa+; devise, test and promote effective strategies to mitigate the major drivers of insects’ decline. Analyse the ecosystem functions underpinned by insects and undertake qualitative and quantitative valuation of ecosystem services emanating from those functions; explore how to implem Programme areas: Horizon Europe (HORIZON), Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness, Food, Bioeconomy Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment, Biodiversity and Natural Resources Keywords: Biodiversity conservation, Biodiversity, conservation biology, conservation genetics, Conservation biology, ecology, genetics, Environmental Conservation, Environmental protection, Environmental stressors, Environmental toxicology at the population and ecosystems level, Habitat Systems, Habitat and species restoration and rehabilitation, Natural resources and environmental economics, Nature conservation, Protection of environment (before, during and after), Species interactions (e.g. food-webs, symbiosis, parasitism, mutualism, bio-invasion), Insects, biodiversity, climate change, conservation, decline, ecology, ecosystem, habitat, pollinator, species