Fund your product innovation
Prototype, test rigs, a new formulation, moving from sample to production: this is the costliest and least certain phase. It is also the one public funding is designed to absorb.
- Developing a new product
- Prototype and pilot run
- New product formulation
- Testing in an outside lab
- Test rigs and materials
- Technical team salaries
- Engineering subcontracting
- Scaling up to production
Programs for product innovation
A tax credit on the technical work, direct funding for the project, and sector programs for scale-up: all three combine.
RS&DE
- Federal · National Research Council of Canada
NRC IRAP
Continuous intakeUnder $50,000 to $10M - Provincial · Ministère de l'Économie, de l'Innovation et de l'Énergie (MEIE)
Primo-adoptants (Early adopters)
OpenUp to $75,000 - Federal · Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
Agri-innover
Continuous intakeUp to $5,000,000
Planning a project like this?
How funding works for product innovation
Public funding for product development does not reward success: it shares risk. In practice, the qualifying work is the work whose outcome was unknown at the outset — a prototype that did not hold, a formulation abandoned after testing, an architecture dropped because it would not scale. Those failures qualify exactly as successes do, and they are often what best demonstrates the technical uncertainty the rules require.
The practical consequence is a documentation question, not an eligibility one. A file is built on dated traces: hypotheses set out, tests run, results obtained, decisions taken. Those traces almost always exist — test logs, shop reports, emails, version histories — but they are only gathered at claim time, a year later, once the people involved have moved on. That is by far the leading cause of money left on the table on this kind of project.
- 01
The technical team's salaries
Engineers, technicians, developers and shop staff assigned to the project, prorated to time actually spent.
- 02
Prototypes and materials
Materials consumed or transformed in testing, parts, development tooling, and pilot runs.
- 03
Subcontracting and external testing
Laboratories, research centres, specialized consultants, standardized testing and validation carried out in Canada.
- 04
Scale-up
Moving from lab to production: pilot equipment, line adaptation, and the first validation runs.
Frequently asked questions about product innovation
SR&ED is the main one: this federal and provincial tax credit can reach up to 64% of eligible expenses for a Canadian-controlled private corporation taxable in Quebec. NRC IRAP provides direct project funding together with an industrial technology advisor. Primo-adoptants, from Investissement Québec, supports companies adopting an innovation ahead of the market. In agri-food, AGRI INNOVER funds innovation and scale-up. These programs combine, subject to each one's stacking cap.
Yes, and it is often the stronger file. Innovation support programs fund the technical effort, not the commercial result: a prototype that did not hold, a formulation abandoned after testing, an architecture dropped because it would not scale are all qualifying work. Failure in fact demonstrates precisely the technical uncertainty SR&ED requires. The only condition is having documented the approach — hypothesis, test, result — during the work rather than after it.
Dated traces produced as the work happens, not a report written at the end. In practice: test logs or registers, minutes of technical meetings, successive versions of drawings or code, test results with their conditions, and time tracking by person and by project. These elements almost always exist within the company; what is missing is having gathered them. Setting that tracking up at project start costs little and is the difference between an amount claimed and an amount obtained.
No, and the confusion is common. Eligibility depends neither on filing a patent nor on the product being new to the market: it depends on the nature of the work done, that is, on whether there was technical uncertainty that publicly available knowledge could not resolve. A product that already exists elsewhere can still give rise to qualifying work if your company had to solve a technical problem itself to build it. Conversely, a patented product assembled from known solutions does not.
The leading cause of money left on the table in product innovation is not ineligibility: it is documentation reconstructed a year too late. Hubvention puts time and test tracking in place at the start, then draws the line between routine development and qualifying work — that split is what determines the amount. The firm then drafts the file, files it, defends it with the CRA, Revenu Québec or the relevant agency, and follows through until payment. The initial assessment is free; fees are set case by case in the engagement letter, before work begins.