Proposals should address the following aspects, as relevant:

• research and development of new scientific instrumentation, tools, digitalisation, and methods for research infrastructures;
• their technology validation and prototyping;
• training of RI staff for the operation and use of these new solutions; when relevant, developing skills on technical validation to industrial standards;
• the innovative potential for industrial exploitation of the solutions and/or for the benefits of the society, including technology concept or validation in laboratory for use by SMEs startups or scaleups.

To minimise the research infrastructures’ environmental footprint and increase resilience e.g. with respect to energy consumption, climate-related aspects or use of critical components and materials, greening and resilience aspects should be addressed for all proposed scientific instrumentation, tools, methods, digitalisation, and solutions.

Developments for the specific use case of research infrastructures are expected to go beyond TRL 4. When proposed developments have the potential to lead to applications beyond the specific use case of research infrastructures, the TRL of these additional developments should go up to TRL 3-4.

Proposals should include at least two different research infrastructures as beneficiaries each of them being an ESFRI research infrastructure a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) or another research infrastructure that is an international European research organisation.

Other technological partners, including industry, SMEs, startups or scaleups should also be involved, thus promoting innovation and knowledge sharing through co-development of new technical solutions for research infrastructures with due consideration of EU technological sovereignty.

Proposals may include PCP subcontracting activities as described in part H of the General Annexes of the work programme. This option encourages the use of public procurements for the competitive development of new specific solutions, whilst opening market opportunities for industry and researchers active in the EU and Associated Countries. By establishing the procurement process in consecutive phases, the PCP activity can support the development of competing designs, prototypes, and solution testing. This ensures that investment risks do not prevent tackling specific scientific and technological issues and allows a problem to be approached from different angles and to test different solutions.

Proposals are encouraged to incorporate in the development and deployment of innovation, where applicable, principles in line with the EU’s environmental policies such as Safe and Sustainable-by-Design (SSbD), circular-by-design and others.

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content is not a mandatory requirement. However, where applicable in the proposed developments, proposals should consider the integration of the gender dimension in the research and innovation content.