The AIDAinnova project is expanding the capabilities of the Acts track reconstruction toolkit in order to make it the state-of-the-art experiment independent tracking toolkit and to develop further R&D directions. In the first 23 months of the project this investment has yielded a number of outcomes: software engineering foundations have been solidified, many state-of-the-art algorithms were integrated, new machine learning approaches were investigated, general usability from experiment frameworks was improved, and GPU R&D has progressed to the point where some of these ideas start feeding back into the Acts core.