Innovation Fund

At the Canada Foundation for Innovation, we invest in internationally competitive research and technology development.

This enhanced and optimized institutional research means ever increasing benefits for all Canadians in the social, environmental, economic and health sectors.

We provide funding to eligible Canadian institutions for equipment acquisition, technology development programs and the spaces needed to conduct world-class research, as well as support for their ongoing operations and maintenance.

For each of our various funding competitions, we invite institutions to submit project proposals that outline their research goals and the infrastructure they’ll need to reach them.

We then recruit experts from around the world to participate in our merit-review process.

Here’s how it works and what you – members of the expert committee – need to know…

First, we group proposals together, by research fields. Then we assign a committee of experts in those fields to provide assessments.

An expert committee is typically composed of a Chair and two to six members, depending on the number and breadth of proposals it will review.

The Chair ensures that the expert committee functions effectively and objectively in accordance with CFI policies.

As a member of the expert committee, your job is to review each proposal independently and submit individual assessments to the CFI before meeting with other committee members.

Using a five-point rating scale, you will need to judge how well each proposal meets the competition’s assessment criteria.

You will need to substantiate your ratings by listing the strengths and weaknesses you’ve identified for each criterion.

To help you properly assess the propositions according to the competition criteria, we encourage you to consult the guidelines for reviewers that can be found alongside the review material in CAMS and on our Innovation Fund website page.

We also ask that you comment on the appropriateness of the proposed budget.

This exercise allows you to identify key talking points that will help focus your committee’s discussion so you can reach a consensus.

If there are many proposals assigned to your committee, they may be divided up between members to ensure that every proposal gets thoroughly reviewed.
All materials necessary to make your assessments are available within two to three weeks of the submission deadline. They can be found in CAMS, our awards management portal.

You will need to activate the account we have created for you to gain access to these resources

Expert committees will meet virtually once or twice, depending on the number of proposals and a CFI representative will participate in every meeting.

With the members of your committee, you will be asked to reach a consensus on the strengths and weaknesses, and ultimately on ratings for each assessment criteria.

The CFI will then draft a report for each proposal outlining the expert committee’s conclusions and send them to the committee Chair for approval.

If a proposal meets the expert committee’s threshold of excellence, the proposal and the report will proceed to the Multidisciplinary Assessment Committee or MAC, for stage two of our merit review process.

At this stage, we regroup proposals based on the size of the applicant institution and the amount of infrastructure funding requested from the CFI.

Guided by the expert committee reports, MAC members are asked to evaluate proposals based on the competition’s objectives and recommend which projects to fund. Note that all funded projects will need to have received one of the top three marks from the MAC for the Team composition criteria.

If the number of proposals recommended by the MAC exceeds the competition’s available budget, a third committee, known as the Special Multidisciplinary Assessment Committee, or S-MAC, is responsible for narrowing down the choices.

The recommended proposals are then sent to the CFI Board of Directors

As you can see, the expert committees are the foundation of our valued merit review process.

Your expertise allows us to fund trailblazing projects with the greatest potential for impact — projects at the forefront of exploration and knowledge that address global challenges and make meaningful contributions to Canada’s social, health, environmental and economic development.