The NSW Small Business Innovation & Research (SBIR) program is an initiative of the NSW Government that provides competitive grants to SMEs to find and commercialise innovative solutions to well-defined problems for NSW Government agencies. The 2021 SBIR program will provide up to $12 million in grants to NSW SMEs to solve the five NSW Government challenges: 1. Connectivity 2. Hyperlocal navigation 3. Koala count 4. Personal Protective Equipment 5. Water purification.

The SA Innovation Challenge will foster new collaborations between researchers and businesses, to harness R&D to deliver technology-based solutions, drive innovation and create market advantage for startups, SMEs and businesses. The Challenge will focus on the Growth State priority sectors of health and medical industries and hi-tech, creating early market advantage and growth opportunities for South Australian businesses.

XPRIZE Carbon Removal is aimed at tackling the biggest threat facing humanity — fighting climate change and rebalancing Earth’s carbon cycle. Funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation, this $100M competition is the largest incentive prize in history, an extraordinary milestone. This four-year global competition invites innovators and teams from anywhere on the planet to create and demonstrate solutions that can pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or oceans ultimately scaling massively to gigaton levels, locking away CO2 permanently in an environmentally benign way. Team registration opens with the announcement of the full competition guidelines on Earth Day, April 22nd 2021.

The challenges will be a chance for everyone’s voice to be heard, we want to motivate and inspire a new generation of thinkers, leaders and dreamers . Our prizes will reward progress across all sectors of industry and society, not just technology. The prizes could be awarded to a wide range of individuals, teams or collaborations – scientists, activists, economists, leaders, governments, banks, businesses, cities, and countries – anyone who is making a substantial development or outstanding contribution to solving our environmental challenges.

Inspired by the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals, the XTC supports and showcases the innovators harnessing the power of technology to address the greatest challenges facing humanity and our planet. Through its global startup competition, XTC provides top contenders the potential for global visibility, the ability to raise capital, network with global entities (corporations, VCs, partners), and gain mentorship opportunities they need to pioneer technological breakthroughs and help power a sustainable future.

Global effort to work with the news industry to help journalism thrive in the digital age. Through rounds of regional funding, the GNI Innovation Challenges will empower news innovators from around the world to demonstrate new thinking in online journalism and the development of new publishing business models.

Challenge asks local nonprofit innovators and social entrepreneurs how they would make their community—and beyond—an even better place. The public and a panel of local judges vote for the ideas with the most potential, and Google.org pairs each winner with a strategic package of support including funding and Google volunteers.

Thinkable is a science competition platform that allows organisations to engage top researchers from world-class universities to communicate, ideate or innovate around innovation objectives important to them.

This international forum promotes interdisciplinary connections between aspiring academics, innovators, entrepreneurs, investors and professionals, known for their excellent work. Participants are given three minutes to present their research work, business model or initiative to a broad audience from science and industry, including a distinguished jury who selects the most innovative and promising idea. Candidates should be research active in any field of the natural sciences, including technology, engineering and medicine, or social sciences and the humanities.

The Humanitarian Innovation Hackathon is a weekend-long event, taking place in Sydney, NSW. This event is designed for university students to work collaboratively in cross-discipline teams to create technology-driven solutions for pressing humanitarian challenges. Participants will be asked to identify practical solutions for real and current problems that are submitted by the humanitarian disaster organisation, RedR Australia.

The Prize is awarded for groundbreaking technological innovations that benefit millions of people around the world by: enhancing quality of life, promoting sustainable development and mitigation of climate change, generating applications with global commercial viability, creating new socio-economic value or stimulating further cutting-edge research and development in science and technology

Provides financial incentives to larger scale co-funded projects that accelerate the development and deployment of significant and highly collaborative industry based platform technology projects.

Fund is a $15 million, three-year initiative designed to help the Australian cyber security industry grow and take ideas global.

Do you have a solution to a global problem? Apply to Solve’s Global Challenges, which are open to anyone, anywhere in the world between February to June each year. Offesr over $2 million in funding to selected Solver® teams, who will join our MIT-backed network and receive 9 months of personalized support from peers, funders, and experts.

SBIRD supports SMEs to work on research projects aligned with defence priorities through the Next Generation Technologies Fund. SBIRD projects may relate to specific challenges identified by Defence, or have a broader scope across an emerging technology field with potential for disruptive innovation. SBIRD projects are research intensive and address future-focused challenges aligned with DST strategic direction and work programs.

Aim to identify and support groundbreaking solutions that engage the private sector and draw from the experiences of affected communities in order to significantly improve – and in many cases, save – the lives of vulnerable people affected by conflict. Goal is to identify solutions that allow communities to respond more nimbly to complex emergencies and take steps to create better lives for themselves.

There are two problem statements to this Challenge. Proposals should include responses to one or both of the following questions: How might we reduce the health risks that certain species of mosquitoes pose to humans? And How might we lessen the nuisance factor imposed by urban and invading mosquito populations? All proposals are required to be socially and environmentally responsible and work towards the benefit of either local or global communities. Must be UoN alumnus, staffor student

Is your Internet of Things (IoT) and Wearable Technology (WT) solution transforming the tech market? The IoT/WT Innovation World Cup®, the world’s leading competition for IoT and wearable tech start-ups, scale-ups and SMEs, is welcoming techpreneurs from around the world to make their innovations striking!

XPRIZE Rapid Covid Testing is a $5 million dollar, 6-month competition to develop faster, cheaper, and easier to use COVID-19 testing methods at scale. No more guessing. No more lack of tests. The world needs more high-quality, affordable testing to safely re-open.

XPRIZE Rapid Reskilling is a $5 million dollar, 30-month competition to quickly reskill under-resourced workers for the digital revolution. The winning team will leverage novel solutions that will rapidly train 500 individuals in 60 days or less at no entry cost, place as many as possible within 60 days, ensure job retention of at least 90 days, and demonstrate exponential adoption by deploying the training solutions for 5,000 individuals in three industries.

The $10M XPRIZE Rainforest is a five-year competition to enhance our understanding of the rainforest ecosystem. XPRIZE Rainforest will accelerate the innovation of autonomous technologies needed for biodiversity assessment and will enhance our understanding of rainforest ecosystems by using rapid data integration to provide new wisdom about the forest as well as inspire new investment and exploration.

Origin is seeking your recommendations and insights on how to optimise their drilling process and maximise the rate of drilling new gas wells. This challenge invites data scientists, geologists, drilling engineers, mathematicians and anyone with a keen interest in data to analyse and provide insight into the drilling data of over 1,000 wells to help them maximise their CSG well rate of penetration.

In this round of the Business Research and Innovation Initiative, the priority areas are 4 challenges that government currently faces in policy and service delivery areas. The grant gives you the opportunity to solve these challenges using innovative approaches.

This round focuses on regulatory technology (RegTech) which uses digital technologies to streamline or enhance compliance for businesses or individuals, and administration for government.