DIA Open Challenge Fund

Context

The DIA Open Challenge Fund (OCF) seeks to leverage private investment to foster collaboration between industry, innovative SMEs, and academic members of the DIA, complementing existing public funding initiatives. 

The OCF covers five different challenges, including topics such as network enhancement, AI Agents, AI clusters resilience, multimodal AI inference, and data traceability.

Goals

• Support the DIA’s mission by enabling joint R&D between industry and academia to advance Datacom technologies and their applications across multiple vertical sectors.
• Allow industry members to define specific challenges, ensuring alignment with real-world needs and technological priorities.
• Integrate each challenge within at least one active DIA Working Group (WG) or theme, with focus areas determined by the hosting WG (e.g. routing, AI, etc.).

Eligibility criteria

• The Applicant/Principal Investigator (PI) must be a full or associate member of the DIA, either as an SME or an academic/research organisation.
  • This requirement encourages new members to join the DIA, with the Challenge Fund serving as a key incentive.
• Applicants must hold a self-directed research role, such as professor, research scientist, postdoctoral researcher, or an equivalent position.
• Applicants must provide evidence of employer support to participate in the programme.
  • This includes formal approval of the time and resources allocated to the project, which may be processed through the institution’s research office.
• The applicant’s organisation must agree to an overhead rate not exceeding 10%.

Available Funding

The funding amount is EUR 60000 for each challenge, for a total of EUR 300000.

Timeline

• Submission Deadline: 01.12.2025
• Notification of the Result: 15.12.2025
• Duration: please check the description of the individual challenges