XLabsInitiative

NSF-OTASO-FY26-XLabsInitiative

OTHER TRANSACTION AGREEMENT SOLUTIONS OFFERING (OTASO) FOR THE

NSF X-LABS INITIATIVE

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Purpose:

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP) announces its intent to establish and solicit proposals for the NSF X-Labs initiative.
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Rationale & Background:

NSF X-Labs represent a bold, flexible, and outcomes-driven initiative designed to build and accelerate novel platform technologies capable of unlocking entirely new sectors, including new fields of scientific inquiry. The program will support full-time research and development (R&D) teams focused on use-inspired scientific breakthroughs and foundational platform technologies that traditional university and industry labs cannot easily address. NSF X-Labs teams will benefit from ambitious R&D goals, operational autonomy, milestone-based funding, and the ability to engage across academia, industry, national laboratories, and nonprofit sectors. The NSF X-Labs initiative responds to the urgent need for the United States to maintain global leadership in science and technology by enabling new pathways for R&D activities that are hard to pursue through traditional grants and laboratories. NSF X-Labs will build new R&D structures that can tackle large-scale scientific breakthroughs requiring interdisciplinary and inter-sector coordination. With this initiative, NSF will bet on ambitious, full-time teams working with urgency and purpose and will provide them with a level of autonomy rarely possible within traditional institutional structures. NSF X-Labs will provide the structure, resources, and flexibility necessary to cultivate early-stage platform technologies that will accelerate breakthroughs and unlock entirely new sectors of the economy. This solicitation was developed using input from public responses to NSF's Request for Information on the Tech Labs Initiative.
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Strategic Objectives:

The NSF X-Labs initiative is designed to achieve the following strategic objectives for the benefit of the nation and national competitiveness.
Build Sector-Defining Platforms – Develop novel platform technologies that can serve as the foundation for future innovations, novel engineering solutions, and/or scientific breakthroughs. These technologies should foster the transformation of scientific breakthroughs beyond traditional outputs like publications and datasets and accelerate innovations within relevant application domains.