March was an exciting month, full of changes and new developments.
In the commercialization ecosystem, all eyes were on the federal and Ontario budgets, which shook up government investment and spending in Canadian business and innovation. In social media, the Stop Kony 2012 campaign went viral, spurring fervent debates between its supporters and critics all around the globe. Facebook also unveiled its new brand pages, leaving many businesses scrambling to update their pages and understand the new format on deadline. We covered all of these subjects and more last month on this blog. If you missed any of our posts, here is a handy roundup.
March 22: What an IP co-ordinator should know, confidentially speaking By David French
March 14: Looking for that sweet spot to get market traction by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
March 01: Yikes … we forgot the demo! by Peter Hanschke
And on a related note…
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By Alexandra Reid
As a regular weekly feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are The Telegraph, On Startups, eMarketer, Guardian, Inc., and Startup North.
The difference between a failed business and a successful one, in five key numbers
As author Alexis Dormandy explains, KPIs are supposed to measure the most important things in a business. They are useful for getting a whole business focused on delivering the really important things. However, KPIs have now become horrendously misused to include just about any number anyone in senior management cares about, someone in finance can measure, or someone in the middle just finds interesting. This post cuts through the noise and shares five vital KPIs that every business should understand, measure, and manage.
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By Terry Lavineway
The Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) program was one of the long-anticipated and highly debated areas expected to be addressed in the 2012 Federal budget. Politically, the government needed to show they were listening to their taxpayers over the last number of years given the amount of consultations, the amount of press and discussion about the SR&ED program and certainly “Innovation Canada: A Call to Action,” also known as the Jenkins Report.
The biggest change introduced relates to the tax credit rate available to SR&ED claimants that are not Canadian Controlled Private Corporations (CCPCs). The tax credit rate for non-CCPCs will decrease from 20 percent to 15 percent. This is a significant reduction. The government’s view is that the reduction of the corporate income tax rate since 2007 along with the corporate tax restructuring of non-CCPCs has resulted in growing pools of unused tax credits; these corporations are not generating enough taxable income in Canada to make use of all the SR&ED investment tax credits that they are generating. Therefore, the government reasons that they can reduce the rate from 20 percent to 15 percent without much impact. While this may be true in many cases, there are definitely large taxpayers in Canada that will be significantly impacted by this reduction. Only time will tell how this change will impact the amount of R&D performed in Canada by multinational corporations or even medium-sized corporations that do not qualify for the CCPC enhanced rate.
The other changes proposed are categorized as:
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By Francis Moran
FounderFuel is a Montreal-based startup accelerator for which I have been a mentor through its first two cohorts. I recently caught up with John Stokes, a partner with Real Ventures, the seed-stage venture firm behind FounderFuel. Following is an edited and condensed version of our conversation. I started by asking John how FounderFuel was going in general, now that it was well into its second cohort of teams.
“Most of the people involved here, certainly myself and (Real Venture general partner) Alan (MacIntosh), have been pretty involved in other accelerator programs to one extent or another. But when you are running on your own and you really get down to brass tacks, there’s always more to it than you see. We took a long time to decide when we were ready to do it, and I think that decision, that preparation was worth while.
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By Terry Lavineway
The Ontario 2012 budget was released March 27, 2012. The general theme of the budget is getting efficiency out of the prior investments and government spending and cultivating the growth presumably inspired by previous stimulus budgets. This focus on efficiency carries through to existing programs and business-specific incentives, specifically with regards to research and development incentives and Apprenticeship Training Tax Credits (ATTC). Aside from these two areas, the budget was quiet with regards to specific tax credits and discretionary funding programs for businesses.
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March was an exciting month, full of changes and new developments.
