Flagship 2026 Call for Proposals: Innosuisse x Armasuisse
Innosuisse and the Federal Office for Defense Procurement (armasuisse) are jointly launching the Flagship 2026 call for projects, which this year is focused on “Resilient and Secure Technologies for Defense and Mobility.” The goal is to foster systemic innovations capable of meeting both civilian and defense needs, while strengthening Switzerland’s technological sovereignty. The call is open to consortia comprising multiple research partners and companies or organizations responsible for implementation.
Resilient and Secure Technologies for Defense and Mobility
The call for proposals focuses on three complementary technological fields:
- The first area concerns resilient positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) systems, including the development of alternatives or complements to GNSS satellite systems: inertial sensors, quantum technologies, precision clocks, antennas, anti-jamming algorithms, software solutions, cyber resilience, and anomaly detection.
- The second focuses on photonics applied to communications and sensors, with topics ranging from secure optical communications and quantum encryption to LiDAR, thermal and hyperspectral imaging, and neuromorphic processing.
- Finally, the third priority area focuses on technologies for detecting and countering drones (C-UAV): radars and sensors, radio frequency monitoring, imaging, multimodal data fusion, command-and-control architectures, and interception solutions. Artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, space technologies, software, and systems integration thus emerge as several of the digital and technological building blocks that can be leveraged by these projects.
A key feature of this edition is its dual-use requirement: the proposed innovations must have relevant applications in both the civilian and defense sectors. A project that is exclusively military or exclusively civilian is therefore not eligible. Furthermore, Flagship projects must go beyond the scope of a single R&D project: they generally consist of three to eight interdependent subprojects and are based on a systemic and transdisciplinary approach that brings together research and industry. Each consortium must include at least three research partners—including a university of applied sciences—and two implementation partners.
For technology-based SMEs in French-speaking Switzerland, this call for proposals thus opens up opportunities that extend far beyond the defense market alone. A company specializing in cybersecurity, AI, autonomous systems, drones, photonics, quantum technologies, sensors, telecommunications, or embedded software can join a consortium to develop technology that simultaneously addresses security challenges and civilian applications in mobility, aviation, critical infrastructure, or communications. Above all, the Flagship approach makes it possible to pool industrial and scientific expertise that would be difficult for a single SME to assemble on its own, with the goal of developing not just isolated, incremental innovations, but integrated technological solutions capable of sustainably strengthening strategic value chains in Switzerland.
