New “Innovation Assistance Program” launches for innovative SMEs

The Cleantech Commons Virtual Concierge Service (VCS) is designed to curate relevant and timely information for members of the Cleantech Commons community.  We understand that the amount of information about assistance programs can sometimes be overwhelming and difficult to navigate.  Our VCS helps point entrepreneurs, startup & early-stage ventures, and growth companies to specific information sources designed to help clean technology ventures to start, grow, scale and prosper.

 

This week: Last Friday, Cleantech Commons executive director, Martin Yuill, participated on a call with Innovation Minister, Navdeep Bains and Iain Stewart, President of the National Research Council.

They provided an overview of how the government plans to use the Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP) to support Canadian innovators and early-stage ventures that are currently ineligible for the 75% Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS) and other stimulus measures announced to date.

This $250 million initiative is about helping retain top tier talent in Canada, Minister Bains explained.

The new “Innovation Assistance Program” is open to small-and-medium-sized-enterprises with fewer than five hundred employees that are working on innovative technologies or research & development projects.

Eligibility criteria are designed to be fairly broad-based.

Startups that are pre-revenue or run on a SaaS model will be eligible, for example – something that has until now been a concern for a number of Canadian startups in regards to the wage subsidy and loan programs.

For more information and to apply, click here: https://bit.ly/2yBUq1G. The deadline to apply is April 29 at 11:59 pm ET.

According to our friends at Boast Capital, the Innovation Assistance Program is designed to provide funding to eligible companies within 4 weeks, and the application form will be streamlined to enable fast processing.

As the goal of the program is to help companies keep people employed, the number of highly qualified/ skilled personnel on your payroll will be the key metric in determining how much funding you will receive.

Also, Boast Capital themselves recently received IRAP funding to build out their “SR&ED automation platform”.

Take a look at their blog post, entitled “Everything you need to know about IRAP funding“. They have outlined their different programs and provide a convenient proposal template.