The eyes of the Canadian commercialization ecosystem will be focused sharply on Toronto and Ottawa this week as the Ontario and federal governments bring down new budgets that are expected to considerably reshape broad programs of industrial, research and business incentives in each jurisdiction..
At the federal level, where the budget arrives Thursday, the main concern will be around the future of the Scientific Research and Experimental Development tax credit, a widely used program that accounts for well more than half of Ottawa’s annual $7-billion support for research and development. More than 24,000 companies every year underwrite at least part of their operations through this refundable tax credit that gets paid out whether the company is profitable or not. The fear is that the federal government will follow the advice of the Expert Panel Review of the Federal Support to Research and Development, a task force that suggested SR&ED be scaled back and the savings redirected into more direct funding of research.
Powered by open dataThe past four years have seen an incredible demand for governments to move towards “open data,” whereby they can stream municipal and federal data into the public’s hands permitting them to create “mashup” applications that, for example, can juxtapose police crime reports against neighborhood maps. And while I always suspected that neighbor who never mowed his lawn or opened his curtains was growing weed in his basement, open data managed to confirm it! This mashup trend first materialized on websites, and over the past two years, as mobile devices became the preferred mechanism for accessing the Internet, has become the basis of mobile application contests. Here the municipality or government runs a competition to see who can make the best mobile application out of the open data sources they have released to the public.
