An innovative new look for Innovation.ca
Welcome to the new Innovation.ca. Today marks the culmination of many months of planning, designing, programming and content development — the essentials of any successful web relaunch — and we hope you’ll be pleased with the result.
We understand how essential our website is to a variety of audiences: researchers and research administrators needing critical information to apply for and manage funds; government officials seeking our latest evaluations or annual reports; journalists looking for story leads from Canadian research facilities; and, businesses hoping to connect with CFI-funded labs to find the equipment and expertise they need.
With this new website, we’ve prioritized three of the values that are at our core and that are simply fundamental to how an organization such as ours communicates online: providing effective services to our clients, being accountable and being innovative.
To that end, we’ve organized our content in a way that we hope will make it easy to find and easy to interact with; we know this is especially important for researchers and research administrators under pressure to meet application deadlines, so we’ve aimed to provide all the information you need about our various funds in one place. We’ve also put a renewed focus on accountability by refreshing our results and impacts section and by giving things such as our mandate, position papers and briefs to the House of Commons in a simple-to-navigate format. To make sure our new site embraces an innovative approach to web design and content strategy, we’ve sought the advice of several experts in the field.
One of the things the CFI prides itself on since our inception is our ability to tell the stories of the exceptional research we’ve enabled in a compelling way that embraces high standards of video and podcast production and the written word. With over 9,000 projects funded since 1997, the CFI is a gold-mine of the best Canadian research stories, and this new site aims to showcase that treasure trove with an updated presentation of our collection of stories.
We’ve added a few new things, too. To start, this new site embraces accessibility and responsive design, so anyone can use our content, from any kind of device. We also wanted to showcase all the good work we do as an organization to address important topics in research in this country; check out the “At issue” section to see how we’ve compiled our thought leadership around things such as Arctic and ocean science and fostering commercialization.
The wonderful thing about the Internet, of course, is that it never stops changing. To that end, we want your feedback so we know where we’ve hit the mark, and where we might be able to serve you even better. Email us anytime at feedback [at] innovation.ca (feedback[at]innovation[dot]ca) and let us know what you think of our new site. In the meantime, have fun exploring all that the new Innovation.ca has to offer.
Gilles G. Patry, President and CEO, Canada Foundation for Innovation