Who is Canada Foundation for Innovation?
Canada Foundation for Innovation is an independent Canadian federal not-for-profit corporation that funds research infrastructure, including laboratories, equipment, and facilities, at eligible institutions to strengthen research capacity across the country.
- Capital funding for research infrastructure at eligible Canadian institutions
- Support for laboratory equipment, research facilities, and shared research platforms
- Infrastructure programs serving universities, colleges, hospitals, and research institutes
- Merit-based funding decisions informed by expert peer review
- Investment in digital research infrastructure, including advanced computing and research data management
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More About Canada Foundation for Innovation
Canada Foundation for Innovation operates as an arm's-length organization established by the Government of Canada in 1997 to strengthen the country's capacity for research and innovation. Its funding covers the capital costs of research infrastructure, meaning the physical and digital assets that researchers use, rather than operating costs or salaries. Eligible recipients include universities, colleges, hospitals, and not-for-profit research institutes.
In institutional and enterprise-style environments, funded assets are typically positioned as shared research platforms, where multidisciplinary teams access instruments, imaging systems, and computing resources through core facilities. Projects generally require matching contributions from institutional and provincial partners, which encourages co-investment across the research ecosystem and supports long-term sustainability of the assets.
From a technical perspective, the infrastructure categories covered include advanced computing and data storage, high-throughput sequencing, imaging, environmental and observational sensors, and laboratory automation. Digital infrastructure projects frequently involve high-performance computing clusters, research data management, secure storage, and network connectivity aligned with national research networks. These environments often rely on standards for data interoperability, identity federation, and open data stewardship.
Decisions about research infrastructure shape where research capacity concentrates, influence the types of research that institutions can pursue, and affect the procurement pipeline for scientific instrumentation, computing hardware, and facility construction. Funding is assessed through peer review, which weighs research excellence, demonstrated need, and the institution's plan for operating and maintaining assets across their lifecycle. The model resembles facility funding programs in other national research systems, although its remit is specifically capital infrastructure.
Within its current solution areas, the organization is positioned in higher education and research funding. Its active activity centers on competitions for research infrastructure across disciplines and on digital research infrastructure that supports data-intensive research across Canadian universities, colleges, hospitals, and research institutes.
Our description of Canada Foundation for Innovation. Updated October 2026.
