CFI announces latest awards in modestly funding Innovation Fund competition

The Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) has announced $333 million in new investments through its Innovation Fund ($256 million) and $77 million in related operating funds pegged at 30%. The IF is the CFI's largest funding program although the latest announcement was smaller than previous rounds and is the last competition prior to the Budget's announcement of $1.33 billion in new CFI funding over six years, beginning in FY16-17

The funding will go to 87 projects at 52 research institutions across the country and includes both new facilities and upgrades of research infrastructure previously supported by CFI. As CFI covers 40% of successful proposals, the total value of the competition was $700 million.

"This competition was the second smallest in the history of the CFI which is the reason we were asking for additional funding to go back to $400-million competitions," says CFI president and CEO Dr Gilles Patry. "The 2012 competition was even smaller and did not allow for facilities. It focused only on upgrades."

The size of the awards range from $284,000 to $23 million — the latter going to a new genomics centre at the Univ of British Columbia (Canada's Genomics Enterprise: A National Genomic Tools Network for Transforming Life Science Research) in conjunction with the Univ of Toronto and McGill Univ. The competition's average project award size was $7 million with the CFI contributing an average of $2.9 million.

Patry says a distinguishing feature of the competition was high number of multi-institutional proposals — a trait the CFI acknowledged and actively encouraged.

"When there are more than three institutions applying, they will get 35% of operating costs covered instead of 30%. It was an incentive to help cover the costs to manage multiple institutions," he says. "It's one of the overarching principles for each competition — excellence, partnerships and value-add."

The competition results culled the best from 305 proposals worth $871 million (CFI portion only) for a success rate of 28.5%. Large universities, hospitals and not-for-profits account for 94% of awards, followed by smaller universities (5%) and colleges (1%). Health-related projects account for 41% of awards, followed by science (20%), engineering (31%), environment 2% and social sciences and humanities (1%). Ontario and Quebec account for 73% of awards, followed by the west (23%) and east (4%).

The CFI's next competition will be launched in February/16 with awards announced in June/17. That means there will be 27 months between competitions — a period Patry would like to see reduced to a regular two-year cycle.

R$