A RIA will organise open calls for joint projects involving EU teams together with USA and/or Canadian teams on emerging topics for the EU Next Generation Internet and corresponding US and Canadian programmes, including technology development, joint demonstrators and joint contributions to standards. The proposal should support open source software and open hardware design, open access to data, standardisation activities, access to testing and operational infrastructures as well as an IPR regime ensuring lasting impact and reusability of results.

Each RIA will support third party projects, from open source developers, to academic researchers, hi-tech startups, SMEs and other multidisciplinary actors, so that multiple actors are funded and collectively contribute to enhancing EU cooperation with the USA and Canada in the development of Next Generation Internet technologies and services. As the primary purpose of the action is to support and mobilise internet innovators, a minimum of 80% of the total requested EU contribution should be allocated to financial support to third parties, selected through open calls.

The consortium should provide the programme logic for the third-party projects, ensure the coherence and coordination of these projects, and provide the necessary technical support, as well as coaching and mentoring, in order to ensure that the collection of third party projects contributes to a significant advancement and impact in the research and innovation domain and in advancing EU collaboration with the US and Canada. These tasks cannot be implemented using the budget earmarked for the financial support to third parties. Beneficiaries should make explicit the intervention logic for the area, their capacity to attract top internet talents, to deliver value-added services to the third-party projects, as well as their expertise and capacity in managing the full life-cycle of the open calls transparently and efficiently. They should explore synergies with other research and innovation actions, supported at national or European level, to increase the overall impact.