On Friday (24 May 2024), NATO's Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) officially inaugurated its new Regional Hub in Tallinn, Estonia.
The Hub in Tallinn becomes the second DIANA office, and follows the opening of DIANA's Regional Headquarters in London last year. A North American Headquarters is due to open in Halifax, Canada later this year.
"Given Estonia's extraordinary track record of innovation, it is a perfect home for DIANA's Regional Hub," said Professor Deeph Chana, Managing Director of DIANA. "The Hub will play a key role in operations across DIANA, as we work to strengthen and accelerate emerging technologies capacity across 32 innovation ecosystems."
DIANA's mission is to bring to bear the full innovation capacity across the Alliance to build a more resilient and peaceful future. DIANA provides funding, accelerator programming, mentorship, testing facilities and connections to investors and end-users to help companies move from ideation to real-world adoption in defence and civilian markets.
In January, 44 companies began DIANA's first accelerator's programme to develop their commercial technologies in response to NATO's security challenges on energy resilience, undersea sensing and surveillance, and secure information sharing.
Nine of these companies follow the accelerator's programme at Tehnopol in Tallinn. On Wednesday (22 May 2024) they demonstrated their innovations at a DIANA Demo Day. Technologies on display included innovative fuel cells, a cyber 'kill-switch', micro wind-turbines, secure optical communications and drone identification technology. Similar events will take place at DIANA's accelerator sites in Turin, Copenhagen, Boston and Seattle.
DIANA's next set of challenges will be launched in July. Specific challenge topics are developed from DIANA's strategic direction, which includes key technology priorities identified by Allies such as energy, information, sensing, health, infrastructure, logistics and space. Applicants will have approximately five weeks to submit their applications, and will be evaluated against a range of different criteria including technical and commercial viability.
