Hey folks. And welcome to this week's episode of the small tech podcast by Ephemere Creative. I'm your host Raph. And today we're going to be talking about funding sources in Canada. If you enjoy the work we do, we would really, really appreciate it. If on YouTube, you hit that like and subscribe button and in your favorite podcast apps, if you can give us a review and a rating and subscribe. We are a tiny team and every little bit of support that we can get helps.
So let's start talking about funding in Canada. There is a lot of funding available in Canada. There's so much from grants, from foundations and from different levels of government and all kinds of other stuff available out there. But we are going to be talking today about, a few different grants and tax credits that we have interacted with on some level, maybe it's because we worked with a client who received that grant. Or tax credit. Or because we used it ourselves.
They are programs that we have at least some understanding of. Specifically also, we'll be talking about the types of funding that you can get when working on a tech product. First, let's talk about the two big ones SR&ED and IRAP. People call shred shred, because it sounds kind of cool, I guess. And it's easier than scientific research and experimental development. So people just shorten SRED to shred. The program is a federal tax incentive managed by the Canada revenue agency.
And basically the goal of it is to incentivize Canadian businesses, to participate in scientific research and experimental development. They want Canadian businesses to do innovative things. And basically the program just offers a tax refund for any sort of eligible research and development costs that you might incur as a business. So let's say you build something and you did something really interesting and innovative.
You basically would submit a write-up to the government explaining why that was different and innovative And why it should qualify for a refund. There are a bunch of different rules about what sort of expenses actually qualify. So you can't do standard off the shelf dev work and submit that for a refund.
But if you did something interesting where, for example, you took two off the shelf systems and you needed some sort of integration and you created a new system to make these two different tools, talk to each other and it's not just off the shelf work but something that is actually legitimately technically complex and has some uncertainty to it, then that is the type of thing that you might be able to get refunded.
There are all kinds of other things that qualify as well, but the things that we've worked on that were eligible for SR&ED were those types of projects, basically connecting different systems in a way that off the shelf tools just couldn't. And building something that wasn't obvious where you really had to think of a bunch of different approaches and kind of experiment and see what worked best and why and then work through your implementation. The next one is IRAP.
IRAP is managed by the national research council of Canada. It provides funding for a small to medium size enterprises. And the program focuses on the development and commercialization of innovative technologies. It offers financial support, technical services, and business advice to eligible businesses. Our experience with IRAP is very much that you have to have a technology product. That is either making money or can make you money and fits into an existing business that is making money.
Really. There's a lot of emphasis on money. Like, is this a thing that will either make money as a product or increase your revenues as a business? With shred. It's a little bit more open-ended you can spend money on something interesting and innovative, but it doesn't necessarily have to be proven to make money for you.
Uh, or as a product or as a part of your, your business, as long as you've spent money on building something that is innovative and interesting, and that sort of fits all of the ticks, all the boxes, then you're good to go. With IRAP they're really looking for products that can, that can make money. And with that said, they'll do a lot of different things. They will hook you up with different programs where they will pay, for example, for you to, go through like a security course.
And they will help you pay for audits on your security and maybe architectural aid if you're building a complex system, they'll do all that kind of stuff. But you really have to prove that you have a thing that is going to make money or you can sell or something like that. Okay, next, we are going to talk about student funding because it's, there's a lot of it. There's a lot of those types of programs.
Uh, I think basically Canada puts a lot of energy into attracting students to Canada and then wants to build an ecosystem here with the talent that we have developed. So first let's talk about, MITACS, and that's M I T A C S not M Y T A X. MITACS provides funding for programs that really target. Uh, university students I think you can, you can work with undergrads and graduate students.
The emphasis that I've seen in the past was on, oh, you can get a bunch of funding to hire a master's or a doctoral student, which is kind of great. You get access to them and you work with their professors to build out really interesting technologies. They are really aimed at fostering this sort of relationship between academia and industry.
So MITACS really wants to build strong relationships between companies and universities and get them working together and fostering like a really strong bond between them. Next, I'm going to talk about a program that we've used a couple of times. That was pretty great. Uh, it's a work integrated learning from ICTC. Which is the information and communications technology council.
And basically what they do is they provide this, this funding called work, integrated learning, which is you hire a, current student for something like a co-op or internship style program. And for, that student for their term, they will, they will provide you up to 50% of that student salary up to $5,000 or up to 70%, up to $7,000 if they're an underrepresented group. So if you're hiring someone who is underrepresented in technology, you can get up to $7,000, which is pretty great.
The next one is one that we have applied for a couple of different times, but never actually landed because it is so competitive. There are so many people applying for this program because it's kind of awesome. And it is called the digital skills for youth program. DS4Y, as it's referred to allows you to hire unemployed or underemployed youth meaning someone between 15 and 30 years old, at small to medium sized businesses. I think the cutoff is 500 employees.
So if you're a company under 500 employees, you can make use of this grant. As long as the. Youth you are hiring is learning something about, digital skills or working in the digital context field, whatever technology. So that might mean doing things like software development or cybersecurity or machine learning or whatever. Anything that you can think of really related to building a tech product, probably makes sense. And the great thing about this program is it offers up to $30,000 per intern.
That includes wage subsidies, benefits, training, and other costs. Beyond that there are a wide variety of more specialized grants that are available. There are a variety of funding programs that you can use to, to help train employees, there is funding available from eco.ca for wage subsidies for people working in the environmental sector. And there are a ton of others. If you search for wage subsidies, Canada, you will find giant lists of programs available.
They each have sort of different eligibilities that are occasionally hard to navigate, so you'll need to be careful as you're digging through all of the details, but check it out. There's a lot of stuff out there. Alrighty. Well, thanks for listening. If you enjoy this stuff, please like, and subscribe on YouTube. And if you listen to podcast, app rate and review in there as well, and make sure to subscribe so you catch all the new episodes. We would love to hear what you think.
And we would also love to have you on the podcast. So reach out to us if you are interested in talking about this stuff. You can email me at Raphael at Ephemere Creative dot CA. I will put that email address in the show notes or hello at Ephemere Creative dot CA. We will get your emails there. And make sure to sign up for our newsletter where we'll be sending you tons of great info about building small tech products.
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