Innovation: A desire to make things better

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Innovation can perhaps be defined; but how it touches our lives can hardly be confined. In the broadest sense, innovation is the desire to make things better. This innately human drive changes our world and transforms us in ways we sometimes are not even aware — from our health, our economy and our planet, to how we understand our past and how we envision our future.

In this knowledge era, innovation is integral to nation building and there is almost no limit to what research can teach us. This audacious vision is what inspired the Canada Foundation for Innovation in 1997, and this collection of stories recalls the resolute spirit of our origins.

Two decades ago, the CFI was itself an experiment — a way to encourage researchers to reach higher, think bigger, and a moment in time when political and research leaders came together to create a turning point in Canadian research by building world-class facilities and stocking them with state-of-the-art equipment. The results have been transformative. In this collection, we present just a handful of the thousands of research projects supported by the CFI since its inception, and aim to illustrate the breadth of ways in which innovation changes our world.