Véronique Dault is Executive Director, Government and Public Sector Partnerships at CIFAR, where she leads the organization’s engagement with governments and public sector partners and oversees its strategic public funding portfolio. Her work focuses on building the partnerships that support Canada’s long-term research and innovation capacity.

Earlier this year, two researchers with longstanding ties to CIFAR received the A.M. Turing Award – the highest honour in computer science – for pioneering work in quantum cryptography.

Around the same time, CIFAR made a very different decision. We closed our Quantum Information Science program after 24 years.

At first glance, that seems difficult to reconcile. Why would an organization walk away from one of its greatest successes? The answer is simple. Not because the science mattered less. Not because the program had failed. But because it had succeeded.

When CIFAR launched the program in 2002, quantum information science was still an emerging field. The commercial applications were uncertain. Governments had not yet developed national quantum strategies. Venture capital had not arrived. Few institutions were positioned to convene researchers across the disciplines required to build the field.

Twenty years later, the landscape has fundamentally changed. Today, quantum attracts billions of dollars in public and private investment. Governments around the world have national strategies. Universities have dedicated institutes. Companies are commercializing technologies. The ecosystem has matured.

At that point, the question before CIFAR was no longer whether the science was excellent. The harder question was whether we remained uniquely positioned to add value. Our conclusion was that we were not. So we stepped aside.

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate over the course of my career is that every institution eventually faces the same question. Not whether to pursue excellence. Almost everyone aspires to excellence. The harder question is how to decide where you can contribute most – and how to recognize when that answer has changed.

Research organizations and governments spend enormous energy debating what to fund. But they spend remarkably little time debating when they should stop.

Research organizations are often judged by the programs they launch. I would argue they should also be judged by how thoughtfully they steward those programs over time – including recognizing when others are better positioned to take the work further. This isn’t simply a question of fiscal discipline. It’s a question of institutional judgment.

Every organization has finite resources. Every decision to continue investing in one area is also a decision not to invest somewhere else. That means scientific excellence, while essential, cannot be the only consideration. Institutions also need to ask themselves where they are genuinely distinctive, where their model creates value that others cannot and, perhaps most critically, when that answer may change.

Our country’s ambitions are growing. Artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, biotechnology, advanced materials and health innovation are increasingly understood not only as scientific priorities but also as strategic national capabilities. At the same time, fiscal pressures are real. Choices will become harder, not easier. That makes institutional clarity more valuable than ever.

That philosophy shapes how we think at CIFAR. Our role has never been to compete with universities, government laboratories or commercialization organizations. Nor is it to move discoveries through every stage of the innovation pipeline.

Our contribution comes earlier. We try to identify questions that matter before their significance is fully understood. Sometimes that means recognizing an overlooked field. Our Fungal Kingdom: Threats and Opportunities program is one example.

For decades, fungal diseases received relatively modest research funding despite their implications for human health, agriculture and biodiversity. Much of the burden fell in lower-income regions, creating limited commercial incentives for sustained research investment by the private sector. Climate change is altering that equation. Fungal pathogens are expanding into new geographies, antifungal resistance is increasing, and the implications for food security, health systems and biotechnology are becoming increasingly visible.

The decision to build a global research community around fungal science was not a prediction about a particular discovery. It was a judgment that the field itself was becoming strategically important before the broader ecosystem fully recognized it. Other decisions involve a different kind of uncertainty.

Our CIFAR MacMillan Multiscale Human program begins with a simple observation: despite major technological advances that enable us to measure the human body at ever higher resolution, our understanding of how biological information moves across scales – from cells to tissues to whole physiological systems – remains limited.

Researchers in this program are drawing not only from biomedicine, but also from fields like computational modelling and geospatial analysis to better understand those interactions. We do not know yet where the work will lead. But the potential implications for how we understand disease and prevention are significant enough to justify sustained exploration.

None of this diminishes the importance of commercialization. Canada absolutely needs more companies built here, more intellectual property retained here and more discoveries translated into economic and societal benefit. But commercialization is downstream, and someone has to ask the questions and make the discoveries that eventually allow commercialization to be possible.

Healthy innovation ecosystems depend on institutions playing different roles. Some lead in discovery. Some specialize in knowledge translation. Some in commercialization. Those roles are complementary, not competing. No single institution is designed to do all of this well at every stage of a field’s evolution.

Recognizing when your own role has been fulfilled is hard and uncomfortable. Researchers build careers. Institutions build identities. Success creates attachment. Yet over time, innovation systems evolve into mature ecosystems with differentiated roles across the entire pipeline.

When they do, organizations built to operate at earlier innovation stages should ask whether their comparative advantage now lies somewhere else.

Stepping back is not a sign of diminished ambition. Sometimes it is the clearest expression of it.

Scientific excellence will always matter. But increasingly, Canada’s advantage will depend on something just as consequential: the quality of the decisions institutions make about where they sit in the innovation system.

Canada's future will depend not only on the quality of our science, but on the quality of those decisions.