CFI Core Facility Time Sharing

Moderate academiaresearchinfrastructurecost-recoveryhardware

The Thin Market Problem

The Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) funds million-dollar lab instruments, encouraging them to operate as 'Core Facilities' with cost-recovery models. However, discovering which university has an available, properly calibrated instrument—and managing the cross-institutional billing and liability—is a bureaucratic nightmare, leading to idle machines while nearby researchers wait months for access or buy redundant equipment.

Dominant Forces

CFI grant compliance strongly encourages multi-institutional time sharing.
High fixed maintenance costs for complex lab instruments whether they run or not.
Inter-university financial transfers and liability waivers are notoriously slow and opaque.

How DeeperPoint Helps

CoSolvent aggregates equipment availability and researcher demand. KnowledgeSlot stores hardware calibration states and standard operating procedures (SOPs). The platform generates compliant smart-contracts to handle indemnification and inter-university cross-billing seamlessly.

Economic Upside

Optimizes a multi-billion dollar national research hardware portfolio. Capturing even 2% of the wasted depreciation via a transaction clearinghouse models into a highly sustainable platform.

Narrative Story

The Idle Microscope

Characters: Dr. Aris - Materials Scientist, Queen's University, Dr. Chen - Core Facility Manager, University of Ottawa

✎ This story is in draft.

Act A - The Market Structure

Academic research relies on multimillion-dollar machines that depreciate rapidly. Despite federal mandates for inter-university sharing, the transactional friction is brutally high. A researcher at University A lacks visibility into the live schedule of a machine at University B, and the administrative hurdle of transferring grant funds between institutions is so prohibitive that researchers often just include redundant hardware in their next grant application.

Act B - The Story

Dr. Aris has a crucial batch of nanomaterials to image for a pending Nature publication. His university's only Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) is down for repairs for three months.

Dr. Chen manages a newly installed, identical TEM in Ottawa. Her facility has an open mandate to recoup maintenance costs and currently has an open week in the schedule.

Dr. Aris searches the platform for the specific TEM resolution and calibration capability. The system flags Dr. Chen’s idle machine. When Aris selects a two-day block, the platform automatically generates a legally binding facility-use waiver and secures an inter-institutional transfer from his Tri-Agency grant account to Chen’s cost-recovery account. Aris drives to Ottawa, completes his imaging, and Dr. Chen's facility secures funds against their OEM maintenance contract.

Act C - Why This Market Stays Broken Without Infrastructure

Without matching infrastructure, discovering an available, properly calibrated TEM and resolving the liability takes longer than the actual experiment. DeeperPoint algorithmically couples the technical requirements, the legal indemnification, and the financial clearance, transforming static university assets into a fluid national research grid.

Characters are fictional. Academic procurement friction is real. DeeperPoint is building the infrastructure this story describes.