DIANA's Launches 2026 Challenges

DIANA's Challenges for 2026 have launched, calling all innovators who are on a mission to develop ground-breaking dual-use technology within this year’s 10 challenge areas.

About DIANA

DIANA is the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic, an organisation established by NATO to find and accelerate dual-use innovation capacity across the Alliance. DIANA provides companies with the resources, networks and guidance to develop deep technologies to solve critical defence and security challenges, from operating in denied environments to tackling threats to our collective resilience.

How DIANA Works

• DIANA seeks dual-use, deep tech solutions to critical defence, security and resilience challenges through public challenge calls. Through a highly competitive selection process, DIANA selects innovators based on their proposed solutions and invites them to join the DIANA Challenge Programme (often referred to simply as the DIANA Programme).
• These innovators sign a framework agreement to become “DIANA Innovators” and continue iterating the solution they proposed in response to the challenge.
• Selected innovators then enter the Accelerator Programme, which is delivered in two distinct phases (Phase 1 and Phase 2). Across these two phases, DIANA Innovators can access DIANA’s test centre network to test, evaluate, verify and validate their solutions against end-user needs.
• All DIANA Innovators, as part of the DIANA Challenge Programme, work to have their solutions adopted by end-users across NATO and Allies.

The Challenges

The DIANA 2024-2025 Strategic Direction defines dual-use priority Focus Areas that combine the potential to address NATO’s security and defence needs, scientific and technical feasibility, and market potential, providing a structural framework developed with guidance from the Allies. These Focus Areas in turn form the basis for Challenge Statements, developed to be as technologically agnostic and non-prescriptive as possible, allowing innovators the greatest flexibility and creativity in proposing novel solutions free from preconceived constraints or methods. The ten Challenge titles are listed below with the detailed Challenge Statements in the subsequent sections: 1. Energy and Power 2. Advanced Communication Technologies 3. Contested Electromagnetic Environments 4. Human Resilience and Biotechnology 5. Critical Infrastructure and Logistics 6. Operations in Extreme Environments 7. Maritime Operations 8. Resilient Space Operations 9. Autonomy and Unmanned Systems 10. Data Assisted Decision Making Full details available here: https://www.diana.nato.int/challenges.html Submissions close on July 11 at 12:00 PM UTC